A patient has a heart attack and wakes up in the hospital. He gets a visit from his doctor, who says he had to shock the patient's heart because part of it had gone into fibrillation. The doctor jokes that it could have been worse if the other part of
the heart had been in fibrillation and that the patient was really lucky. Which chambers of the heart in the patient were in fibrillation, the atria or the ventricles?
What will be an ideal response?
The patient was probably in atrial fibrillation. The atria function to make heart contractions most efficient. Even without the atria providing maximum efficiency, the ventricles will still pump blood. Because the ventricles do the actual pumping, fibrillation in the ventricles means the heart cannot pump at all, which would have been much worse.
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