I’m still trying to figure this one out. This is what happens in our hospital too!
We had a patient who was in supraventricular tachycardia with a rate of 180 and who was having substernal chest pressure. Her EKG showed that she was starting to get a little ST depression in the lateral leads.
We chemically converted her back into a normal sinus rhythm. Then her chest pain went away and her EKG normalized.
To me, that’s a positive stress test, but I digress.
So we get all the labs back and I call the admitting doctor. I run through what happened, what meds the patient received, and the lab results.
“What’s the urine show?”
“Ummm. We didn’t get a urine.”
“Why not?”
“The patient was having chest pain and a cardiac arrhythmia. What’s a urine going to tell you?”
“I’m not accepting the admit until you call me back with urine results.”
Fine. I played the game and got the STAT urinalysis.
I was hoping that the patient had a whopping UTI so I could publish a case study on the correlation between UTIs and cardiac arrhythmias.
As fate would have it, the urine came back normal.
Dang it.
I did have fun trying to think of a graphic to add to this post that related to urine infections and heart racing, though. Couldn’t do it.
Posted by WhiteCoat on November 25, 2008
