Your heart is about the same size as your fist. It beats without instruction from the brain. It has intelligent and intuitive capacity. It knows its job and its job is nothing less than assuring your survival. Here are some stunning statistics revealing what your heart actually does to insure you keep on the go each and every day.
- An average adult body contains about five and one half quarts of blood.
- All the blood vessels in the body joined end to end would stretch 62,000 miles or two and one half times around the earth.
- The heart circulates the body's blood supply about 1,000 times each day.
- The heart pumps the equivalent of 2,000 gallons each day.
- Heart beats per minute range from an average 70 to 120 and over an average life span of 70 years the heart will beat more than 2 billion times.
How important is the human heart? You can lose a kidney, a lung, have paralysis affect various regions of the body, lose parts of mental capacity, or even be “brain-dead,” but if you lose your heart you become dead-dead.I am the lucky survivor of two near death causing internal injuries where life-saving blood transfusions were given me within a space of two years.
Both life-saving events occurred while I was writing my first novel The Last Valentine. In fact I used that singular experience of near death from blood loss to describe the final moments of one of the main characters who had been fatally wounded in the plot’s World War Two battle. See, I understood first hand a stomach wound with blood draining from me at a dangerous rate. I could describe how our hero felt, minute by life draining minute.
Here is what it fells like to be dying from sudden blood loss. You get cold as the blood moves first from the extremities to the vital organs. What decides this blood transfer for you? Your brain? No, the heart decides. It just knows what to do as it furiously picks up speed to send blood where it needs to go to keep the body alive.
As the blood continues to seep out of you, the vital organs are prioritized, and those most vital have the blood rushed to support them. You begin to get the chills even in July. Your heart is racing yet you can barely keep your eyes open – the oxygenated blood that feeds your brain is needed elsewhere. Doctors race to stop the flow of blood and you will be given someone else’s blood while they patch you up. But dying from blood loss doesn’t hurt. As you lose consciousness you also lose concern. A strange surrender envelopes you as you drift into unconsciousness.
Because of my concern for HIV possible tainted blood supplies, which had occurred in the 1990’s, I begged my friend, Dr. Neil Whitaker to find any other way to save me but by transfusion. He answered. “Jim, I don’t think you understand. This could be the ‘Big Adios.’” I recall weakly asking, “You mean as in ‘hasta la vista baby?’ That ‘Big Adios?’” He nodded. “Okay. Send the blood in,” I strained in answer.
It is no wonder my thoughts have turned to the miraculous and moving feeling concerning heart matters as I turned out such titles as, The Last Valentine, Ticket Home, The Good Heart, Paradise Bay, and As A Man Thinketh…In His Heart. The gift of life, the receipt of blood donated anonymously by another, is humbling and causes one to pause in gratitude and wonder at the preciousness of life. Someone with a very good heart offered me the life sustaining blood to carry on, not once but twice. I think about that every time I see the American Red Cross symbol, or “Blood Drive” signs around town.
We often are tempted to extol the human mind as the most brilliant of all God’s creations, the most magnificent computer, unlike anything man can create in all its capacities to compute and process commands and thoughts in real time.
Interestingly, no matter how much the brain demands and begs for our attention, the gentle and forgiving heart just moves on, doing what it does a thousand times each day – sustaining your life, giving you mortality, offering you another chance at life—a tomorrow.
Take time to thank your heart, and to share your heart-felt feelings with others. I’m glad someone unknown to me donated what had once passed through the most magnificent of God’s creations –the human heart!
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