Notes from the Ward
Writing by Dr. Chenna Reddy Tera — commentary on the research I'm reading, the patients I'm learning from, and the pearls worth keeping.
Gap Junctions — Nature's Finest Engineering
Nature had to make hundreds of millions of separate cells contract at the same instant — and the solution it found is also the reason pacing therapy works at all.
The Action Potential — Five Phases That Keep You Alive
Five phases, handed off like a relay race, roughly once a second for your whole life — and every ECG you have ever read is just the sum of billions of them.
The Moment I Saw My First STEMI
Tombstoning in V1 through V4, exactly as obvious as the textbooks promise it never is — and what it taught me about how fast an ECG really is.
The AV Node — The Most Important Pause in Medicine
A structure the size of a grain of rice holds the signal for one fifth of a second, every beat, for your whole life. The PR interval is that pause made visible.
Four Seconds
Four seconds of flat line on a 3am telemetry strip, and the distance between knowing a fact and understanding its weight.
Twelve Angles, One Heart
An ECG is not one test — it is twelve simultaneous views of the same electrical event. Once you see the leads as camera angles, the patterns stop being patterns to memorise.