This was a looooong chapter.
It starts off getting you familiar with directional and positional terms. Then it goes on to cover the systems of the body:
Musculoskeletal, Cardiovascular, Nervous, Digestive, Skin, Endocrine
I’m good with a lot of the information because of my massage therapy training, but I’m starting to wish I’d done this when I was still a younger sponge brain. It’s been so long since I had to really study and memorize, those parts of my brain have atrophied to a degree. Studying hard causes my brain to start to cloud over and get thick. I have to take lots of little breaks. I suppose that like any exercise, the more I do it the better I’ll get. I hope so.
The main difficulty I had yesterday was with the heart.
It’s got four sections:
Right Atrium
Right Ventricle
Left Atrium
Left Ventricle
Blood gets pulled in, blood gets pumped out. There is an exchange of Oxygen and CO2. The Left Ventricle is the strongest part of the heart. And Artery = Away. As in: arteries carry blood away from the heart. And there are a bunch of those suckers. We all know a few of them. Where do you check the pulse? In an adult it’s the Carotid artery; that pulsing one on the neck that sticks out dangerously when you are angry. In a baby you check the Brachial artery on the arm. You all know the Femoral artery. Why? Most likely because it’s in the “groinal region” and made everyone giggle when they were in junior high health class.
There are capillaries, and specialzed muscle tissues just for the heart and veins and little veins called venules and electrical impulses and and and and…
I’m not going to try to describe how the blood flows right now because it’s 7:30 in the morning and I’m still working on my coffee. I’ve drawn pictures of how blood moves from the body, through the heart and back out; I’ve written it all out; I’ve read that section three times… and it still confuses me.
Suffice it to say, I need some help with the heart.