Discussion Week 5 Cardiovascular System

Randi Marchant, a 42-year-old waitress, was vacuuming the family room when she felt a painful squeezing in her chest again. This was the third time today, but this one really hurt. She sat down to catch her breath and stubbed out the cigarette she had left smoldering in the half-filled ashtray by the couch. Randi’s husband, Jimmy, and stepdaughter Melanie had pestered her until she finally had taken time off work to see her doctor.

Dr. Harris found that her blood pressure was 158/88-probably owing to the noon rush stress at work, she rationalized. At least her cholesterol test was only 30 points above average this time. It had been slowly coming down, even though she cheated on her diet.

Another wave of pain tightened its icy fingers around her heart, and the pain moved up into both sides of her jaw. Randi thought, “Probably just a little heartburn. Since the pain doesn’t radiate down my left arm, it couldn’t be my heart, could it?”

“Don’t think about the pain,” she told herself. “Think of something else. Melanie’s prom dress needs altering.” Randi fell to the floor, clutching her chest, just as Melonie walked in. She saw her stepmother slumped on the floor and screamed, “Oh no! Help, somebody, help!”

Assuming that Randi is suffering a myocardial infarction, discuss why it is important that she receive appropriate treatment quickly. What signs and symptoms are consistent with an MI? What are her treatment options?

Incorporate terminology from this chapter into your posts
Look for outside references to support your answers
Initial post must be a minimum of 5-6 complete sentences

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.