Let’s talk about the heart. Of all the living creatures, the fairy fly (a kind of wasp) has the smallest heart, and the American pygmy shrew, while being the smallest mammal, has the fastest heartbeat at 1,200 beats per minute. While not that fast, a woman’s heart beats slightly faster than a man’s heart, which averages out to be two ounces heavier. The human heart beats about 115,000 times and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood every day. Unfortunately, heart attacks are too familiar. Most of them happen on Mondays, and Christmas is the most common day of the year for an attack. There is such a thing as broken heart syndrome from a rush of stress hormones. The first open-heart surgery was performed in 1893 by an African-American cardiologist, Daniel Hale Williams. So what about your heart? This week, let’s talk about that.
