preview

Unit 2 Case Study Essay

Decent Essays

Unit 2 Case Study
For this myocardial infarction, the right coronary artery was blocked. The parts of the heart that were affected by this blockage was the right atrium, the right ventricle, the interventricular septum, the Sinoatrial node and the AV node, and some parts of the left atrium and ventricle. These parts were affected because the right coronary artery supplies blood to these parts of the heart; since there was a blockage the blood was not able to continue through the right coronary arteries into its branches, which are the sinoatrial nodal artery, the right marginal branch, the posterior interventricular branch, and the atrioventricular nodal artery (Gest).
Once deoxygenated blood enters the right atrium, it travels through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle. Then the blood goes through the pulmonary semilunar valve into the pulmonary arteries. Once in the pulmonary arteries the blood is pumped into the lungs where it is then oxygenated. The blood goes from the lungs through the pulmonary vein into the left atrium. From there it passes through the bicuspid valve into the left ventricle where it is then pumped out through the aortic semilunar valve into the aorta (Drake 101). From the aorta the blood goes to the right and left coronary arteries. …show more content…

The dying cardiac cells from the heart stimulated visceral afferents which followed the sympathetic fibers to the spinal cord. The reason the referred pain was in the left shoulder was because the visceral afferents enter the spinal cord between T1 to T4, which is the same location that somatic sensory fibers through the posterior roots. Both the somatic sensory fibers and the visceral afferents synapse on interneurons and secondary neurons which causes the brain to be unable to distinguish between the two signals (Drake 114). This causes the pain to be felt in the left

Get Access