A Cook County Hospital Emergency Medicine Blog for up-to-date medicine and more.
You receive a call from the lab for a critical result; your patient has a potassium of 6.0. You order an ECG and then look around for an attending for help. Should you just give the patient sodium zirconium cyclosilicate (commercially known as Lokelma), or should you throw the kitchen sink at the patient? Are those T waves peaked? Panic no longer - let’s talk hyperkalemia.
Samson Frendo, MD and Eric Leser, MD
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Figure 1. Index ECG.
A 49-year-old male with no reported past medical history presents to the emergency department (ED) with a 5-day history of chest pain. He reports a history of intense, substernal chest pain yesterday that was unrelieved, leading him to schedule a clinic appointment for the next day. At the clinic, his primary care doctor advised him to come straight to the ED after completing a “strange EKG.” On arrival in the ED, the patient denies any active chest pain in triage. However, he states that he has some mild pain in the middle of his upper back, “probably just from mowing my lawn the other day.”
Austin Reynolds, DO; Michael Hohl, MD; Taylor Wahrenbrock, MD; Ari Edelheit, MD
Read MoreLacerations are among the most frequently treated injuries in pediatric emergency care. The process of repairing these injuries can provoke considerable anxiety in children, which may lead to heightened pain, difficulty completing the procedure, and negative psychological and clinical effects (1-6). Midazolam is widely used to manage procedural anxiety in children, with intranasal administration gaining popularity in recent years. A recent study by Martin et al. explored both clinical and child-specific factors that may influence the effectiveness of intranasal midazolam (7).
Taylor Wahrenbrock, MD; Samson Frendo, MD; Eric Leser, MD; Joanne Routsolias, PharmD
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