Suppose you are a blood cell about to enter the heart. What vessels would you pass through as you traveled from the Aorta, to the Myocardium and then to the Right Atrium?
The Aorta is an artery: it exits the heart.
The myocardium is the walls of the heart. Like any other muscle, the heart needs nutrients (including oxygen) to work. For purposes of “feeding” it, your heart is the same as the muscles in your calves, it simply happens to be in a different spot.
Blood entering the heart’s cavity does not go through the myocardium… the wall that goes through the myocardium will eventually enter the cavity, of course, but the path into the cavity does not go through those arteries and veins which feed the myocardium.
Maybe I’m just confused by your question, are you familiar with the blood cycle at all, or trying to get it explained?
Thanks, yes just mostly trying to have it explained.
Perhaps, I could phrase the question differently
Imagine a single blood cell, what would be it’s path as it travels through the heart?
P.S. It’s for my A&P Class and I am studying but am having a difficult time breaking down all the material for this one simple question.
As stated, the heart needs a blood supply (i.e. oxygen) just like any other organ or tissue. So, . . .
A red cell ultimately supplying the heart (myocardium) first leaves the left side of the heart (the left ventricle), enters the aorta, then almost immediately enters a coronary artery. From there, the artery branches and branches . . . becoming an arteriole and branches some more, . . . and gets smaller and smaller until it’s become a capillary; and so the red cell travels along as the artery branches, becomes an arteriole, capillary, etc. Finally, when the red cell arrives at the capillary, its oxygen diffuses out into the tissue where that capillary is located (which, in the case of your question, is the myocardium).
For the trip back to the right side of the heart, the capillaries grow larger and larger and join up to eventually form venules (sorta the complement of arterioles) and the venules join up to eventually form . . . NOT a vein but a SINUS, which is much like a vein. Blood from this coronary sinus then goes back to the right atrium, into the right ventricle, through the pulmonary artery through the lungs, out of the lungs into the pulmonary veins, into the left atrium, and finally the left ventricle, and voila, you’re back where you started.
Yes, and, as described it eventually leads back to the myocardium (or any other part of the body). So I think Scotty Mo’s question was well formed.
Here is a map of cardiac blood flow.
But he’d said “you’re a blood cell about to enter the heart”. If you’re about to enter, you’re very much not in the aorta.
Well not to sound all snarky but do you have a textbook or access to the internet? This is for an A&P class, after all. I could tell you all about it, having been a respiratory therapist for many years, but previous posters have it covered. I hope the SD is not your best resource for this kind of basic information, not that we aren’t absolutely incredible in all ways.
Oh, I see. OTOH, I assumed he meant the red cell was going to enter the heart insofar as in being perfused into it (i.e. via a coronary artery). In that situation, the cell is simultaneously both in the aorta and about to enter the heart (i.e. aorta ==> coronary orifice ==> coronary artery ==> heart).