A well-oiled machine.

"What you need to do," the house supervisor said to me, "is learn to lower your expectations.""F. you," I replied, with a sunny smile.We'd just gotten a patient in, a guy in his fifties who was, according who what we'd heard from the house soup, status post-TPA, hypertensive as a habit, with a dense left hemiparesis. We'd heard that from the house soup because there had been no report from the outside ED from which he'd come. There had been no warning that the patient was on his way; we'd been waiting since early afternoon and it was now five minutes from the end of the shift. Of course.Luckily, the dude could talk. Peej and Bethie moved him on to the bed and Peej took a first set of vitals.His blood pressure was 80 over 44.(Note for the non-medical among us: 80/44 is a perfectly respectable blood pressure for, say, a teenage girl who runs track. It's not good for a guy in his fifties, and it's *especially* not good if said guy has been running, since time immemorial, in the 150's over 90's or higher. Your body gets used to a certain amount of blood going at a certain pressure to all your organs, and something much lower or higher than that usual can cause problems.A low BP, in particular, can lead to hypoperfusion of the brain, especially after an ischemic stroke. That means that all your stroke symptoms come back and further damage is done because there simply isn't enough blood, at high enough pressure, to fully supply the brain tissue.To give you some idea of how importan...
Source: Head Nurse - Category: Nursing Authors: Source Type: blogs