If you are an instructor, or a fairly new student, you don’t always need to see “challenging” ECGs. But, you may not want to see “standard” ECGs from an arrhythmia generator, either.Every ECG contains subtle and not, so subtle characteristics of the person it belongs to.Take a minute to look at this ECG before reading the discussion, and ask yourself what you might surmise about the patient.
The Patient: We don’t know much about the actual patient this ECG came from.What we do know is that he is an elderly man with a history of heart disease who was hospitalized sometime in the past with an acute M.I.He is now on beta blocker medication and is on a diet, as he is approaching the “morbidly obese” classification.He is now in the ER with shortness of breath and mild chest pain.What does his ECG tell us?
This is another one of those instances where I fortuituously viewed this ECG the day it was performed in our triage department several years ago. I immediately knew what was happening here but apparently nobody in the emergency department saw the obvious clues.
