Shock to the Heart

If any of you knew/ know Bon Jovi's song, "Shot Through the Heart" you'd probably laugh that I thought for years that it was "Shock to the heart and you're to blame, darling, you give love a bad name."  I guess the reason was that we didn't have the internet back then where we could google the lyrics.  I have a young friend currently trying to get me to learn a song from Shakira without cheating by looking at the lyrics.  As I barely know Spanish, it will be fun to learn how I mispronounce/mishear all these new words.

Thinking of the misheard Bon Jovi lyrics, 'shock to the heart' it correlates to something that I recently learned about.  An older friend of mine had a double bout of pneumonia over the turn of the new year and suffered severe congestive heart failure needing constant oxygen as part of the treatment now.   In the last couple of weeks her pulse started to slow and she didn't feel good.  It turned out that she had developed A Fib (atrial fibrillation).  What does this mean?  Put simply normally the heart contracts and relaxes in a rhythmic pattern with the pumping actions of the atrium and ventricles. In atrial fibrillation the atrium beats irregularly and sort of quivers instead of pumping the blood into the ventricles/lungs as it should.  You can imagine, this is a very bad things.  It can cause blood to slow down (as in the case of my friend), blood to pool causing clots, and strokes.  There are medicines that can be used to help stimulate atrium.  In some cases, as in my friend's case, electrical cardioversion (shocking the heart) can be used to send a low voltage of electricity through paddles on her chest to charge the atrium into its regular pattern.  She was pretty scared at first because at her age, they couldn't knock her out, they needed her awake.  However, she was quite pleased that they were able to give her medicines to make it so she couldn't feel it, as well as a muscle relaxant.  She had been in the hospital for three days, and after the procedure she was sent home as the electrical cardioversion is typically an outpatient procedure.  She had so much energy.  Unfortunately two weeks later she has A Fib again.  She is currently taking the medicine and has the choice of trying the shock therapy again.  She is older though and is ready to move onto the next life.  She is a great woman though, one of my heroes.

For the official Bon Jovi video on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZHPOeOxQQ