cardiac help!

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Hi all. I am new to this site. I am second semester nursing student. We are heading into cardiac material Monday and I just don't have a good understanding of it going in! Any tips or hints that will help me remember basic heart function...blood flow, etc.? Thanks!!!

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Specializes in Intensive Care Unit.

Look up the pump your blood song on YouTube. I learned it in high school and its never failed me!

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Thanks....I will check that out!

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Specializes in ER, progressive care.

Get a good NCLEX book and read the material and do the practice questions pertaining to cardiac.

As for the blood flow through the heart...just constantly reviewing it over and over eventually made it stick.

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.

Welcome to AN! The largest online nursing community!

Cardiovascular Anatomy: Cardiac Physiology Tutorial

Answers questions on cardiac physiology and see how chemical solutions affect heart function.

Learn Your Arteries: Click on images to learn the names of the various arteries in the body.

Map of the Human Heart: Provides an anatomical diagram of the heart and has a moving image of how blood moves through the heart.

Shockwave animations: Includes animations of heart circulation, an EKG, an electrocardiogram, and a heart sounds graph.

Heart Anatomy | Anatomy of the Heart | Human Heart Anatomy

I hope these help :)

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Specializes in being a Credible Source.

This may seem goofy but...

spend some time playing with a garden hoses... turn the water up high and low... put your finger over the end... get some pvc fittings and neck it down (keeping the faucet the same, etc. Play with straws and water and milk and oil (different viscosities)... Play with water balloons... try squeezing them different ways to see what happens... fill them different amounts and see what happens.

Ideally, get a cheap pressure meter (mcmaster-carr has anything you'd ever want) and try to correleate pressure to what you observe.

Try to develop a sense of hydrodynamics and you will find hemodynamics much easier to understand.

then, think about the basics of what the heart is trying to do: get blood to the lungs to dump waste and pick up oxygen and then get it to the brain and other tissues to deliver nutrients, oxygen, and signals and pick up waste to be processed by the liver and excreted through the kidneys and lungs.

The basics are very, very simple but even the details aren't that bad when you break them down and think of analogues with which you're familiar.

(Damn do I want to be a nursing instructor.)

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This guy has a TON of instructional videos that have helped me and my peers. Offers another way to learn.

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