Congestive Heart Failure

Signs/Symptoms: A person with Congestive Heart Failure can experience numerous symptoms. A person's symptoms can provide important clues to the presence of heart failure. (Cadwallader p. 1143). Some of these include: JVD, SOB, frequent coughing when lying down, edema, acites, fatigue, syncope, vertigo, and sudden death. (Cadwallader p. 1142). Heart failure happens when the heart cannot keep up with its workload. Heart failure is a chronic , progressive condition that means the heart cannot pump enough blood and oxegen to support the organs in your body. Many people think the term heart failure means the heart has stopped working complety, it just means that its not working efficiently. When your heart can no longer pump effieciently there are certain things it does to try to make up for not working like it should. The heart will enlarge, when it enlarges the chambers of the heart stretch so it contracts more strongly which means it pumps more blood , but in doing so your body starts to retain fluid, in return your luings get congested and your heart can start to beat irregulary.Another way the heart tries to make up for things is starts developign more muscle mass and thus starts pumping faster. Your heart will do all of those things on its own, you may not even notice until you start having symptoms later on down the road. This is your bodys natural mechanisms tryign to compensate for the loss of work your heart cannot put out. This is why many americans all over are walking around with heart failure and may not even be aware. There are three