The Heart Essay -- Biology

â€Å"The heart† The Heart is a very important organ in the body. It is what keeps your blood flowing and your organs going. It is a tireless muscle that pumps more than two thousand gallons of blood every day. The blood that is pumped is filled with nutrition and oxygen (Colombo 7). It travels through out your body in less than sixty seconds. So it needs to be taken extra good care of. When abuse is put on the body, the heart’s performance is not at its best. The Heart is a major organ that needs loving and care. Everyone has only one and by abusing it, they are cutting their live span little by little. People can live their lives freely but how they choose to live them could be the difference between life and death. The heart is a pump with four chambers made of their own special muscle called cardiac muscle. Its interwoven muscle fibers enable the heart to contract or squeeze together automatically (Colombo 7). It’s about the same size of a fist and weighs some where around two hundred fifty to three hundred fifty grams (Marieb 432). The size of the heart depends on a person’s height and size. The heart wall is enclosed in three layers: superficial epicardium, middle epicardium, and deep epicardium. It is then enclosed in a double-walled sac called the Pericardium. The terms Systole and Diastole refer respectively and literally to the contraction and relaxation periods of heart activity (Marieb 432). While the doctor is taking a patient’s blood pressure, he listens for the contractions and relaxations of the heart. He also listens for them to make sure that they are going in a single rhythm, to make sure that there are no arrhythmias or complications. The heart muscle d oes not depend on the nervous system. If the nervous s... ... initiative to live longer by doing a few extra steps, or eating cheerios instead of a thick juicy donut. It may not seem like much but it is. The Heart is a major organ that needs loving and care. Everyone has only one and by abusing it, they are cutting their live span little by little. People can live their lives freely but how they choose to live them could be the difference between life and death. By eating healthy, exercising, people can live longer lives. People who smoke, drink, and don’t exercise normally have to look forward to a lot of testing such as: cat scans and x-rays. They get to go through surgeries, such as: Bypasses and stents. Eventually doctors can no longer do any more for them but place them on machines that will continue the heart’s job. Why not choose to live life to the fullest and take care of one of the body’s most important organs.