In the Cath Lab

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“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

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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