Left-Sided Heart Failure

Your heart is no longer pumping powerfully enough. The left ventricle — the chamber that is supposed to drive oxygen-rich blood throughout your entire body — can no longer manage. Blood backs up into the lungs. Fluid enters the tissue. You can't breathe. First under exertion, then lying down, eventually sitting up. Your breath becomes shallow, pressed, panicked. The body is fighting for something that should be self-evident: room to breathe.

Medically the diagnosis is clear — a weakened pumping function, often the consequence of high blood pressure, heart attack, valve defects. And yet a question remains that cardiology does not ask: why can this heart no longer pump forward with full force? Why does what is alive back up instead of flowing freely?