BODY STORY - UNDER PRESSURE - Have you ever wondered what happens to your body in a crisis – a car accident, for example, or an acute allergic reaction? Would you like to know why the cabbage-soup diet doesn’t work, or why eating a chicken can lead to an experience not unlike an alien invasion? How do we get through adolescence, when it sometimes seems as if our bodies are rioting and our brains have given up altogether? The award-winning series Body Story reveals the biological drama behind six critical moments in human lives.
John Palmer is 45 years old – the foreman on a construction site. He lives a stressful life, working to tight deadlines, snatching meals when he can and doing little exercise. Over the years, excess cholesterol has created fatty growths - or plaques - in the narrow arteries which supply blood to his heart. Each plaque is a tiny time bomb. It won’t take much to trigger a crisis.
John is having a bad day, but it’s about to get much worse. A spontaneous football game on the building site sets of a series of events that leaves John’s life in the balance. As he chases after the ball, blood flows through his narrow coronary arteries with growing speed and pressure. A plaque bursts, and a blood clot forms leaving part of his heart cut off from its oxygen supply. John is having a heart attack.
We follow the emergency team who battle to save him. They give him a drug which dissolves the clot. But as blood flows back to his starving heart muscle, one microscopic heart muscle cell starts beating out of time. This single cell is all it takes to disrupt the rhythm of his heart so much that it goes into VF - ventricular fibrillation. It shivers uncontrollably, pumping no blood at all. The medics must stop John’s heart completely for a few seconds to allow it to return to normal. Will John survive?
