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Help Wanted:
1. Mistake correction
2. Drawing illustrations in vector
You’re a man after my own heart…
I just wish you’d put down that scalpel!
The heart is a very important organ in the human body. It pumps life-giving blood throughout the body and does this continuously – day in, day out, year in, year out – for your entire life. On the average that’s about 2 billion beats in a lifetime.
The body has only one heart. You can live without a kidney and other organs. The brain can reroute (somewhat) around damaged nerves. But you can’t live when your one heart stops.
In engineering you can design something to last a long time either by making parts redundant (if one fails then there are others to take its place) or by using parts that are very, very reliable. This latter case describes the one heart in our body.
Pm not trying to make a case for diet, exercise, and no smoking; Pm more interested in pointing out the importance of keeping your heart beating during electrical play. Many folks rely on simplistic formulas like ‘‘no electrical play above the belt” – which may be too conservative a rule for some situations and too liberal a rule for others – rather than learning the principles behind the relationship between the heart and electricity. I’d rather further your understanding of those principles so that you can make your own, informed decisions. To that end, let’s take a look at the heart in its relationship to electrical play.
Figure 28: The heart
Figure 28 shows a typical heart. It’s a very simple pump with four pumping chambers. And the heart body is made of muscle cells that contract when they receive the correct signal from the nerves that control the heart. Rather than go through a detailed description of the pumping action of the heart, here I just want you to understand that the heart muscle and its controlling nerves are made of cells that can be affected by electricity.
The heart is made of muscle cells which, like other muscle cells, contract – when they encounter an electrical signal.The nerves that control the heart actually provide the necessary timing for the signals that make the heart muscles pump properly – first the upper portion of the heart, then the lower part. This timing is usually provided collaboratively by the cells of the heart itself, by the brain (via the vagus nerve), and by the sinoatrial (SA) node, at the upper right “corner” of the heart. If any one of these stimuli fails, the heart is missing part of the information it needs to keep on beating normally, and will start beating abnormally – or stop beating altogether.
These signals can be affected by external stimuli. If you get excited, for example, chemicals like adrenaline floating around your bloodstream send a stimulus that speed up your heartbeat. If you become very relaxed, the heartbeat slows down.
If a person has heart problems bad enough that this normal nerve signal mechanism doesn’t work, he sometimes gets a pacemaker implanted that provides the necessary timing signals to the heart. Modern pacemakers are designed so that the heart rate can be increased or slowed down in response to the wearer’s activities. This pacemaker modification, however, is done by other signals than the brain signals and the chemical signals used by the body.
Remember that I said that these heart rate modifications can be caused by nerve signals (electrical) and chemical signals. So there are two heart-related matters that you have to concern yourself with when doing electrical play.
It could be possible that using a TENS unit on, say. a bottom’s feet might suppress the impulses from the vagus nerve, slowing the heart to the point of stopping it. I’ve never heard this happening, but it is theoretically possible.
Actually, I did hear of one anecdotal case where someone was playing with a relaxicisor across his nipples for an extended period of time. He was really grooving on the experience, but he noticed that his heart was really slowing down. There was no additional data available as to whether this slowdown was due to electrical action or chemical action, but he was concerned enough about it that he stopped that play session.
So far, what do we know about the heart and electrical play?
We know that the heart is an extremely important organ in the body. There’s only one, and when it stops, you’re dead. We also know that the timing of the heartbeat is governed by a variety of factors which must work in combination to keep the heart beating in rhythm. We know from the previous chapter that both muscle cells and nerve cells can be affected by externally applied electric currents. Muscle and nerve cells are major parts of the heart system – and we know from personal experience that many people have heart problems of various kinds.
So what does this ail mean for electrical play?
One of the first things you’ll need to find out about your partner who wants to receive electrical stimulation is: what is the condition of her heart? In particular, ask her if she has, or has ever had:
If you are going to do electrical play with someone, these questions should be included in your negotiations – and if you’ve gotten a “yes” answer to any of these questions. I’d counsel extreme caution, or perhaps that you consider another form of play altogether.
As you play with your partner, be aware of his body signs and responses. In particular, it would be wise to check his pulse periodically. Even if you used an electronic pulse monitor, it still would be wise to take the pulse manually from time to time. Don’t know how to check a pulse? – find out!
That leads me to my next point. Learn CPR! Don’t do it from a book. Take a certified course from the Red Cross, American Heart Association or National Safety Council, and recertify every year.
Remember I told you that electrical play is edge play because you can’t react fast enough to prevent injury or death? If you are going to play with electricity, you should have an answer to the question, “The bottom’s heart stopped. What do I do now?” CPR is very important – but since CPR is simply a technique to maintain life until the paramedics arrive, don’t be reluctant to call 911. Embarrassment is a far easier penalty than 25 to life in the pen being butt-fucked by hard piped cons who don’t stop when you scream “red.”
Ending with that thought, let’s go on to the next chapter where we’ll learn the shocking truths about electrobiology.