What I Wish I Knew: Potassium-K Lab Value Levels

What do bananas, avocados, and kale all have in common?

Potassium!

For more resources to help you understand Potassium, Hyperkalemia and Hypokalemia, click here:

What role does it play in the body?

What’s a normal range level for potassium?

And what happens when potassium levels are too low or too high?

On a shift early in my career, while I was still being oriented to the unit, I held tight to that rule of NEVER pushing IV potassium even when my preceptor was providing instructions that conflicted with that big rule. Here is that story...

This patient’s lungs were so bad, gas exchange had to take place outside of his body... Learning to read ABGs, and understanding what to do with that information is a very important skill for any nurse, but particularly a cardiovascular ICU nurse.

Hi I am Nurse Abby, and I loved working in the cardiovascular ICU - that was truly one of my favorite nursing jobs. Today I want to share with you the story of one of my MORE complicated patients.

This week I opened up some old nursing school notes, and I started remembering how hard nursing school really was!

I remember, in particular, getting a little confused between the different types of shock.

When I was studying distributive shock I found one key 🔑 point that actually cleared up a lot of the misunderstandings and confusion. That started to really turn things around for me in nursing school!

Hey man, so uh, just letting you know that I’m at the hospital being admitted. I’m having a heart attack, so I probably won’t be in tomorrow."

When my patient's son said he wasn't feeling right, it would have been easy to assume it was because of the stress he was under.

He was visiting his sick mom . . . in the ICU nonetheless.

But something just didn’t feel right"

ICU Nurses- Voices for the Voiceless For more on cardiac care to help you in nursing school visit

NURSING.com/heart

Roughly 1 out of every 3 patients in the Intensive Care Unit, on average, are unable to communicate. Because of this, the role of an ICU nurse stretches far beyond providing medical care alone, but also acting as an advocate, or a voice for the voiceless to ensure that these patient’s needs, rights, and wishes are heard, recognized and respected. In doing so, these warriors in scrubs essentially embody the very essence of healthcare: compassion, advocacy, and unwavering commitment to patient welfare.

Welcome to the NURSING Family, we call it the most supportive nursing cohort on the planet. At NURSING.com, we want to help you save time in nursing school as we take you from discouraged and stressed to motivated and passionate with clear and concise, must-know information to help you pass your tests and improve your grades, so that you can focus on becoming an amazing nurse. YOU CAN DO THIS! Check out our freebies and learn more at: (www.nursing.com)

For more Carditis and the heart just visit NURSING.com/heart.

Did you know that the average human heart beats 100,000 times a day, pumping 2,000 gallons of blood?

Now, imagine if this vital pump was under threat from, pericarditis, myocarditis, or endocarditis and couldn’t pump effectively.

In this episode we will look at the importance of understanding carditis and an easy way that I used in nursing school to remember the area affected by each type; then, run through a quick scenario at the end to apply what we have learned.