Saturday 3 December 2011

Heartbeat

This morning I took my pulse (as you do) because I was bored/curious. It was around 65 bpm, so not too bad, but then I started thinking. My heart has been beating my whole life. It never stops. It never sleeps. It just keeps on working to pump blood round my body. And it has the capacity to keep going for another seventy  years at least, barring accidents or dietary disasters.

I find that amazing.

I wondered how many times my heart had beaten during my life, so I grabbed my calculator. I took my average bpm to be about 80, and I did the calculation 80*60*24*365*17. (I left out leap days because they account for less than 0.1% of my total days on Earth.)

I found that by my last birthday, I had lived through over 700 million heartbeats. Isn't that just staggering? To think that that little ball of muscle inside my chest, that has been with me even before I was born, that without which I would surely die, has worked so hard, but not even broken a sweat!

Using the same method, I calculated the number of heartbeats per year to be a little over 42 million.

We need to look after our hearts. I think it's too often we take them for granted. It wasn't until today that I realised the miracle that is the human body. And not just the human body, but that would be going off-subject.

By the time I'm nineteen, it will be around 800 million beats, and by the time I am eighty, it will be around 3 billion.

It just keeps on working. And it won't stop for as long as you live.

1 comment:

  1. Numbers can be staggering. o_o

    I never thought about that, haha.

    ReplyDelete