A shocking day at work
Posted by GruntDoc on August 21st, 2009
Today’s included the therapeutic application of electricity
and a real oddity: an adolescent with a potassium of 1.8 (yes, I repeated it).
Emergency Medicine can be mundane occasionally, but days like today make for a really nice change.
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August 21st, 2009 at 6:34 am
Do you know the cause of the low potassium? Seems like we had a low potassium like that back in my training days….toluene/glue sniffing?
August 21st, 2009 at 8:42 am
Nice! Was the Fibber stable?
Not sure about the K, haven’t seen one that low – just in the mid 2s
August 21st, 2009 at 9:12 am
Bulimia?
August 21st, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Prolonged diarrhea? Laxative overuse? Renal wasting? Eating too much licorice?
Guessing the cause of the low K could get interesting.
August 21st, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Did you ask the teenager for the diagnosis. Usually they know everything.
August 21st, 2009 at 8:24 pm
hypokalemic periodic paralysis?
August 21st, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Sniffing paint (toluene) was the cause of the lowest potassium I ever saw.
August 22nd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Was the adolescent Asian? I’ve had one idiopathic hypoK and I’ve heard it’s more common in that population.
August 24th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
I cannot say any more about the case, as it would probably lead to a specific patient (how many of these are there, anyway?). So, no more from me.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
[...] you can make sense of this crazy ECG, then you are a better doctor than I. Via Grunt Doc. Hint – I suspect either electrical [...]
September 9th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I have no idea what all this means, but it looks complex. I’m guessing that you don’t want your charts to have a piece of paper like that stuck in them.