No more Caffeine!

My Steam course is called Disease, and focus on how the body works and how it also creates diseases and sickness in your body. In the first unit called Body, we learned about cancer, how how different diseases can manifest themselves in your body. For our first action project we were asked to pick a disease, create a patient profile for the person that we chose to interview. I picked STV which a heart disease, the reasoning I picked this disease was because my mom has it. I didn't know a lot about it, and it was really easy for me to interview her. What I enjoyed the most about this action project was drawing the profile to show the disease and were it affects the body. 

Created by JV 2015*

Lucy was at work when she felt tightness in her chest and pain on her left shoulder, she started getting really hot and started sweating. She felt like she was going to faint than all of a sudden her heart started beating so fast and felt little shocks were hitting her heart. She sat down by the nurses station, they took her blood pressure and it was really high. Her boss then took her to the hospital. The doctors didn't really know what was wrong with Lucy, they ran tests and said she just had a mini heart attack. She was than released from the hospital, but when she got home she drank a cup of coffee and ate a piece of dark chocolate, and just in a few minutes she had another attack but this time it was even worse than the first. She went back to the hospital and was diagnosed with SVT. She knew that this heart diseased was passed down in her family but didn't know she had it. She never felt symptoms until she had her first attack. She grew up her whole life not knowing she had this disease, so why would it show up now? Lucy was under a lot of stress, she works in a nursing home with 12 hour a shift. That can put a lot of stress on your body, she also consumed lots of caffeine she drank 8 cups of coffee a day. That is a lot of caffeine that the body can't handle especially the heart. This disease also makes your blood really thick, since the heart has an irregular heart beat, there is a lot of blood being pump into the body. To thin Lucy's blood she has to take aspirin, and Cartia to slow her heart rate. After being diagnosed with SVT Lucy had to change her diet, she could no longer consume anything that has caffeine in it. Lucy started having the more attacks, her heart rate would go up to 230 beats a minute. "Having attacks feels horrible, you don't know when it can happen."

 Supraventricular tachycardia was passed down genetically from Lucy's father side of the family. This can be a risk because Lucy's children can carry down the disease and pass it down. The disease mostly occurs in Women, and Lucy has 3 daughters. When Lucy is having an attack she experiences electrical impulses starting from the Sino-atrial node. Than travels to the Atrio ventricular node causing shock waves to the heart. SVT  can happen all over the world because its genetically passed down.