Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

Author:Eden Robinson [Robinson, Eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Sagas
ISBN: 9780307363930
Publisher: San Val
Published: 1999-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Pull your heart out of your chest. Cut away the tubes that sprout from the top. Place your heart on a table. Take a knife and divide it in half, lengthwise. Your heart is hollow. Each side has two chambers. The top chambers receive blood and the bottom chambers pump it out. This requires great strength, so the bottom chambers are larger and more muscular than the top chambers. The right side takes oxygen-poor blood from your body and pumps it into your lungs. The left side takes oxygen-rich blood from your lungs and pumps it back into the body. The pulse you feel at your wrists and neck is actually the shock wave emanating from the epicentre of your beating heart and vibrating through your arteries.

Look closer. Notice that each of the four chambers has a valve, a flap that controls the direction of the pumping blood. Put your heart back in your chest. Plug your ears with your fingers and listen carefully. You should be able to hear a rhythmic lub, dub, lub, dub. The sound you are hearing is not the heart muscle itself, but the four valves in your heart closing. At the beginning of systole, your heart goes lub. This is the sound of the two valves that let blood into the lower part of your heart slamming shut. At the end of systole, your heart goes dub. The two valves that let blood out of your heart have shut. If your valves don’t close properly, your heart murmurs.

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