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Atmospheric air (21% of the air you breath is oxygen) is inhaled through the mouth and into the lungs via negative pressure created in the chest cavity by accessory muscles. Once in the lungs, the air continues to travel in the airways until it reaches the tiny air-filled sacs called alveloli. Your body contains about 150 million alveoli, each of which are about one cell thick and covered with capillary blood vessels. The sheer number and thin membrane of alveoli increases surface area within the lungs, optimizing the alveolus' ability to allow gasses to diffuse through their membrane in mass quantity. Oxygen follows a concentration gradient from ambient air still in the alveoli (where it is more concentrated), through alveolar membranes into deoxygenated blood returning to your lungs via blood vessels leaving the right side of the heart. This concentration gradient is what drives oxygen into the blood plasma (the fluid component of blood). Once here, the hemoglobin in red blood cells begin to pick up the oxygen molecules from the plasma where a majority of it is ultimately stored. In fact, approximately 98% of oxygen in the blood of a healthy adult is bound to hemoglobin in this manner and is referred to as "oxygen saturation." This oxygen saturation can be measured with a device called a "pulse oximeter" that passes a light through your skin, quantifying the percentage of oxygen bound to hemoglobin. Most people in medicine consider a oxygen saturation of > 95% to be normal. BLood can sometimes become purple in this proccess.

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14y ago

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