Cardiologist Shadowing

I finally started my shadowing! Woo hoo!

My primary care doctor is both a general practitioner and a cardiologist. He mostly sees patients with referrals for stress tests or ECGs. It was pretty monotonous at times because he asked the same questions, and say a lot of the same things. One patient, though, sure made things interesting.

This patient had an ECG done that indicated he had suffered from a myocardial infarction. The machine detected it and so did the doctor. What was really odd is that the patient never experienced the pain of a heat attack. The doctor explained that it must have been a very minor heart attack. I was just standing there in awe of the situation. The patient then wanted to know what happened to the heart after the heart attack, so the doctor responded by saying that the heart forms scar tissue where the dead muscle cells are, making the heart less efficient.

All of this was just so cool to me. After seeing that patient, I told the doctor that I had just learned what happens when a person suffers a heart attack. When a person suffers a heart attack, some of the muscle cells die. In response, the fibroblasts in the heart muscle make collagen to fill in that area, which is the scar tissue formed on the heart. Since it isn't muscle tissue, it doesn't have any contractile abilities so it makes the heart less efficient in working as a whole and transmitting the electrical signal across the whole heart.

This encounter was so awesome!