“I’ve always loved hearts,” she said.
She was a cardiac nurse who had been drawn to a job in the catheterization laboratory.
“It’s so rare to have an opportunity to immediately do something good for somebody, but it happens often in the cath lab,” she told me. She described how beautifully the heart works—how we don’t even have to think about it and it still beats for us.
Listener Poet Ravenna Raven
Mayo Clinic Transform Conference 2019
September 2019
In the Cath Lab
I love the heart for its automaticity.
The whole circulatory system
fascinates me: how blood is pumped
from one chamber to another,
all the arteries and capillaries, veins
and venules, how you can feel the rush
of the pulse on a person's wrist
and how every vessel has potential
to tell a story about the body.
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