Heart Laboratory

"There's poetry in anatomy". If you look at this sentence keeping in mind the idea of the heart you have found my definition of cardiophilia. I will explore here its artistical side (with some science sometimes)

[heartlaboratory]

Few instants before the last free throw, Nicole's heart started to beat like crazy. It was her brain stem autonomous functions control center ordering to release a flood of adrenaline in her blood flow, asking her body to give anything for such an important moment.

She was invited at her high school for a basketball reunion match.

At 30 years old, just by standing, her heart is beating as fast as a zone 4 endurance training session.

You look at her and you see her chest throbbing up and down, pushed by the brute force of her heart contractions. Once at home you know she'll need a carefull auscultation to be sure such an effort didn't induced any damage

[heartlaboratory]

It is commonly said that once reached a certain age a normal person completely ceases to sprint. While it is untrue, people still sprint under some circumstances but on average it becomes something so rare that there's no conditioning on such extremely high intensity efforts and they can become potentially harmfull.

Like it's the case for Claire that you can see in the picture: she wasted time and she missed the bus to go to her first day at the new job. You can see her running as fast as she can to reach a different station before it's to late. The effort is so heavy that her heart is now beating at 187 bpm, 100% of her maximum heart rate; a rhythm that clearly can't be held for much time, especially given the fact she barely workout at all.

[heartlaboratory]

You've been invited by Claudia, one of your office collegues, at a party to celebrate her 35th birthday. At the time to blow out the candles, she leans towards the cake and, thanks to her body constitution, through her ribs you can notice a rhythmical throb: her heart is pounding like crazy, probably due to the emotions of the moment and alcohol. In that moment, with the power of imagination, you see through her green dress and her chest and her heart appears in front of your eyes. It's a little fatty and enlarged, probably due to three decades of almost total lack of physical activity, alcohol consumption and smoking. If it was possible to touch it, it would probalby have the same consistency of a plastic baloon filled with water and this could explain why it is bumping against any of her internal structures, moving so much, revealing its activity on the exterior surface of her body. Thanks to your scientific study you know that, throughout her life, that heart has probably realized around 2 billion systoles... sadly, given its actual status, who knows how many are left...

[heartlaboratory]

You're coaching a step training session at your personal trainer studio and by looking at one of your today's customers (actually a friend of yours) you see she's particularly out of breath. Fortunately you're not only a trainer but also a magician and casually you know a spell that can give you a more interesting view on the situation. That enchantment gives you the possibility to see through a parallel realm that is exactly like our own but in there space works in a different way and can be manipulated, enabling you to modify things or see through them and the modifications won't have necessarily an effect on our realm, usually. You open the portal to that realm on her chest, with the help of projected ghost hands you open her top training suit and make part of her chest wall invisible revealing the beauty of her beating heart. You're the only one in the room capable to see the realm modification so no one else is noticing anything different from the norm. Your friends's heart is pumping rapidly and with great force as she keeps jumping upand down from the step. You can appreciate each contraction; systole and dyastole follow one another in front of your eyes, ecstatic by the beauty and the power of her cardiac cycle. Her heart is throwing around 160 bpm and just with a little more of concentration you can clearly hear the slamming of her valves like you're laying your ear right over her left ventricle, from there you can also hear the air rapidly filling her lungs. Suddently you realize you could project another hand and try to caress that pumping organ, at least just to feel the texture, the solidity of such a powerful muscle... but you realize that interfering with its rhythmic movement, especially at such a fast pace, could be catastrophic to her life. Well... just a small poke on the apex, what could go wrong?

[heartlaboratory]

You're visiting the anatomical museum in the university where you study. There, different anatomical samples like wax statues, organs and systems conserved using different techniques and models are shown to the public. In one of the areas your attention is captured by a quite unique museum work, a real woman that is standing completetely naked in the hall, near a sign that says: "Female's Heart". She's wearing on her left chest an experimental diagnostic tape, made by the Laboratory, that changes the supeficial layers of the body's light refraction properties making them almost completely invisible and revealing what underneath of few inches. As she's holding her breath you can clearly see her heart palpitating in her chest.

[heartlaboratory]

Reports indicate that heart events are rising between young adults (20 to 50 years old).

That's exactly what happened to her: she had a massive myocardial infarktion while working at the office. Her heart simply couldn't handle the amount of stress and the bad habits and it suddently gave up at the age of 32.

[heartlaboratory]

When you take "training heart to failure" too literally.

Cardiomegaly (giant heart) is a condition that in bodybuilders can result from high intense training adaptation but also from the use of performance enhancing drugs and in this latter case changes are not physiological and can result in an increased risk of sudden cardiac death.

Look at her heart, she's performing another strenuous workout but her heart can't go above 150 bpm. It has become too big and too heavy and now she has a probability of around 87% to suffer from a major cardiac event that can take place any moment... while training, while driving, few minutes after waking up in the morning...

[heartlaboratory]

She's exhaling her last breath bound to a wooden pole planted on the seashore, her heart, removed from her body, is still beating in the hand of the tribal chief.

Former known as: "The wandering elf", a quite famous travel influencer, she was exploring a tropical paradise with a couple of friends when they were surrounded by locals. At first they thought they were chosen for a joyfull wellcome ritual, given the fact those people seemed so happy to have met them but the glee quickly turned into fear as she was tied on the pole and her top bikini torn to expose her chest as the two friends of her were forced to stare at her. held on their knees. While the tribe was chanting and she was screaming, an hole was rapidly cut right under her sternum. One of the tribsemen put his hand inside the gash just to quickly remove it with a lightning-fast move. His hand was so experienced and the movement so fast that what he took off in order to show it to the crowd, her heart, was still beating at the same pace as when it previously was in its anatomical place.

The two friends, petrified, stared at her red heart strenuously palpitating in the man's blood-covered hand before they were sacrificed too few moments later.

Being pale white with green eyes and red hair was something so rare to the tribe that only a god incarnated could have such traits. They mistake her for a divinity and decided to honor her by liberating her from her physical prison. To fulfill such important task, the only possible way was to extract the organ in which the soul resides: her heart.

[heartlaboratory]

This is what "The inhabitant"* saw before blowing the fatal attack on its prey.

It uses echolocation to hunt that combined with its sight creates three-dimensional images of its preys most vital and noisy organ, facilitating its targeting and making its venomous puncture lethal and efficient. As a venom it uses an extremely rare cardiotoxin that interfere with the heart cells contraction, blocking it on a molcular level and causing an almost immediate cardiac arrest if precisely injected on the heart. Normally what it finds is limited to mice, sometimes mountain lions, always no more than small mammals or lizards and their heart dimension varies from a seed to a walnut; they are tiny and noiseless, definetly hard to hear and find. But this... it was so big and loud it was like a beacon in the dark and to make things even easier, this prey kept emitting clear calls.

The closer it went to the prey's body the faster and louder the pulsations became making the strange looking creature even more irresistible... Till in an instant all became quiet and dark again when the sharp needle passed through such soft and delicate tissues, delivering its lethal load to its natural target.

Toghether with her fiancè they used to enjoy long and adventurous hikes, sometimes in exotical places. They were like a team, wearing the same blue shirt in every adventure. This time they were exploring an underground web of caves in a tropical paradise mountain range, the tourist guide told them to avoid a specific path but she took mistakenly the wrong turn while the others were distracted and got lost...

*the name given by locals to a mythical insect-like creature that was supposed to live in the caves.

[heartlaboratory]

When she became aware that her heart ceased to beat due to three shots perfectly placed on the organ she understood she made three mistakes: 1- accept the job, a rookie bounty hunter for the fastest gun in the west... bad idea. 2- leaving at home the chest plate... protection over heat resistance next time (?) 3- holster with an excessive retention grade... safety not always first.

[heartlaboratory]

Can you guess what this young model is feeling in this situation? She was working as a promoter in a famous goth beauty brend public event and a guess kept asking for free samples... She tried to explain her that she was just a promoter and she simply couldn't, if a customer wanted a greater amount of merch it has to buy it, she could not make the company loose money. What she didn't know was that that annoying person was an ancient witch and an ancient witch can't accept a no as an answer, especially when you are talking about beauty. After another refusal the witch said: "In this case I'm going to take your heart as a free gift!!" The poor model hadn't enough time to understand the actual meaning of what she heard that the witch's fingers simply passed through her chest like they were passing through thin air and literally took out her heart with an innatural simplicity. She's now standing in front of the showcase, her leather corset almost untied, her skin is pale white and a zip-like cut lies on her chest. She's looking at her own heart, beating outside of her body, held by that strange bothering person, a flebile pulsation could be heard through the air. Few seconds later she collapses on the ground, the whole terrorized public is left frozen in position.

[heartlaboratory]

A short horror story:

Camille decided to face her fear to undergo total anesthesia for a mini-invasive procedure, something that will be over in just few hours. Her doctor told her that the heart defect she has since birth will neve be something to worry about and it gives her no more than a slight heart murmur but, having the money, she thought it's a good idea to do some "personal growth" and overcome this fear.

She suddenty woke up in the middle of what should have been a routine surgery. The anesthetist couldn't know she has a rare mutation that makes her refractory to the drug used to make her fall asleep and the effect lasted for a too short amount of time. Nothing could have prepared her to that situation. She's conscious but can't talk or move, she's still lying on the surgery bed, her chest is cut open and the surgeon is pumping manually her heart. On the background the sound of a flatlined monitor echoes in the room. "Pump it faster!" screams a surgeon. "We are losing her!!" shouts another one.

For completely unknown reasons she experienced a cardiac arrest during the procedure and they had to perform a thoracotomy on her trying to restart her heart given the fact that adrenaline and compressions failed.

The surgeon's strong hand, covered by a green latex glove, is giving to her heart manual compressions that are so effective that enough blood is ejected from the organ enabling her to stay conscious during the whole thing.

Can you imagine the level of terror she's experiencing?

[heartlaboratory]

For the Sky Race Trophy (a 150 km bicicle competition held in the mountains at high altitude) the Laboratory participates with a small team of athletes. The peculiarity is that those athletes, all volunteers from the young interns from different Laboratory's unit, are using the race for a study about the heart. For the study they are all going to wear a special screen on their chest that will make some part of their external thorax "invisible" exposing the surface of their hearts. An action cam is placed on the bicicle handlebar and pointed at the heart to record in live the athlet's cardiac cycle. The aim of the study is to analize the external heart activity during strenous physical efforts at high altitude. People can watch the live too by simply following a link on the Laboratory's site for fundrising.

It seems that the most interesting live is from Nicole, with her having the majority of viewers. She's a young and good looking woman from the public relation unit but she has a quite scarce fitness level. The head of the study told her it was probably not a good idea to enroll in the experiment but she insisted and now she has become one of the most interesting subject of the whole project. After only few dozens of chilometers she's literally out of breath and her heart, clearly pulsating in the center of her chest, is about to explode being stuck at around 190 bpm for almost an entire hour now. Normally the organization would suggest her to stop but she knew the risks and this is part of the study so she is told to give her best. The coronary arteries around her crazy-beating heart are bulging, trying to bring enough nourishment to the organ under such an uncommon circumstance. On her face an expression of pain and suffering is becoming more and more evident (she probably has myocardial infarction-like symptoms). The whole team looks carefully knowning her heart is very close to its limits waiting to see what is going to happen when that line is crossed.

[heartlaboratory]

At the police department rumor has it that a strange new criminal is active in town. An identikit is not available nor it has ever been seen in action; it doesn' take anything from its victims nor it hurts them in any way. Some local young women reports fragments of faded memories, dream-like memories, of strange events... Through hypnotic regression, detectives managed to obtain better description of the crime. The victims report almost the same story: to have gone to bed like any other normal night yet they sudden woke up in the dark, naked and completely tied up by a rope on the ground in different position, so tight to be unable to move. An obscure figure is holding a stethoscope on their chest, listening to their terrified hammering heart, seemingly recording its beating. Suddently the victim wakes up the next day having almost no memory of what happened the passed night. The heartbeat stealer they call it.

[heartlaboratory]

What would you do if your date shows up with a strange body implant that like a porthole let you see the inside of her chest? Can you image to see her beating heart for the whole appointment?

She sais it's for a continuous medical exam she's undergoing, there's a camera that is recording her heart movements but the "window" enables her cardiologist to assess her heart directly. It can be made opaque for everyday life but she decided to left it transparent... just for the occasion.

[heartlaboratory]

Fabién completely ignored the police warning to stay at home that night: a crazy psycopath, evaded from the sanatorium, was probably lurking in the area.

A threat that became very real in her mind only when almost all the lights in the multi-level underground car parking went off and she started hearing sinister laughs in the dark and the screech of a pointed metal object scraping against the concrete wall.

Now, scared to death, trying to hide somewhere somehow, her mind is saturated by the crazy beating of her own heart: "It's throbbing must be so loud that almost surely the killer can hear it in the shadows. Each stroke guides the monster closer and closer"

Petrified against a column, she waits to feel the cold steel making its inesorable way through her chest, directly to the epicenter of such an earthquake, finally terminating it once and for all.

There, she can do nothing beside just feeling what she thinks are going to be the last beats of her own heart.

BA-BOOM BA-BOOM BA-BOOM...........

[heartlaboratory]

Fabienne, a german PhD student, has recently discussed her thesys. She designed a new diagnostic machine that is able to make internal organs visible. it's something similar to an x-ray even though less powerfull but instead of radiations it uses magnetical fields and can be considered safer for the patient. She's now celebrating with her friends in her apartment. They are all drinking a lot and given the fact that the PhD discussion was held in camera she decides to give a live demonstration on what her invention does to all her friends. She gets up from the table where they were talking and drinking, she adjusts the machine's active component (a white screen) height at the level of her chest and having turned the object on she places herself right in front of it. She's standing in pose, smiling, some glasses of wine made her cheecks a little red. A white glow of light is emanated by the screen and almost immediately an important portion of her torso disappears, even the white sleveless dress she's wearing becomes invisible. On the contrast, on the inside, shadows are very visible. The audience of friends is pretty impressed. "Are those your bones?" asks someone. "They look like your chest major blood vessels!" states someone else. "Yes! Yes! - answers Fabienne - but can you see my herz?! it should be right in the center of my chest! and it's beating pretty fast!! I'm so fascinated by cardiology, and the heart is my favourit topic at all in science!!!" The shadow of her beating heart is actually very clear. "Faby, we can see even your tits.." says one of the guests, holding an empty bottle of wine. Suddenly Helena, a med student that reached the party after the shift, gets up staggering and visibly drunk. She holds the stethoscope she are still wearing and gets closer to Fabienne. "Faby... can I listen to it?? please, please, please" She asks slurring. "Oooooh" Answers Fabienne blushing even more. Her heart starts beating like crazy.