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Saturday, October 13, 2007

CVA at the doctors office

We got the call for a 78 year old patient at a doctors office having a CVA (cerebral vascular accident aka stroke) as I was about to eat the ice cream that I had just purchased. We arrived at the office to find our patient sitting in a chair trying hard to breathe. The Nurse Practitioner told us that our patient had had some difficulty speaking for the last two days and it felt to her the same as when she last had a stroke. The reason she came in today to the doctors office was her shortness of breathe. We did a quick neuro check to try and rule out a CVA and everything came back as it should. We also listened to her lungs. She was wheezing pretty heavily. We patched her on the monitor and got a breathing treatment ready. On her ECG she was having VERY frequent PVCs (premature ventricular contraction, which are early beats of the heart). This can, in severe cases, lead to V-Tach (ventricular tachycardia) and death. We gave her the breathing treatment and kept an eye on her heart rhythm. Once she started breathing easier the PVCs were a little less frequent. We called the hospital and let them know what we had and that we were only a couple of minutes away. Once we dropped off our patient and finished all the paper work I returned my sights to my ice cream. Unfortunately it was now mush. Oh well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ice Cream isn't good for your waistline anyway.

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