Hey there everybody and welcome back to the Straight A Nursing

Podcast and today's podcast is brought to you by a reader of the Straight A Nursing website who a

website whose name is Charlotte and thank you Charlotte for the excellent

suggestion that we talk about shock. So today we are going to be talking about the basics of

shock, the four types, what you're going to assess and how you're going to

treat these patients.

We're also trying something a little bit different

and I hope that it works where we're going to be taking

these longer, more extensive topics and posting them as both a podcast and a blog post.

I'm trying to figure out the mechanics of that so that the iTunes description is not the entire

3,000 plus word blog post because I think that would be a little bit cumbersome.

I think I've got it out, but if for some reason I didn't

and you're getting this on your iTunes with a ridiculously long episode notes section, it is because I failed miserably in my quest to be

technologically savvy. So anyway let's get started talking about shock. So what is it exactly? The very short answer is that

shock is a syndrome of hypotension slash hypoprofusion that leads to inadequate oxygen delivery to the

tissues and impaired cellular metabolism and this is ultimately going to cause organ dysfunction or if it gets really bad organ

failure. So let's kind of back up and go through each of these things all as a whole.

So the first thing is the state of hypotension.

Low blood pressure, guys.

That's what we're talking about with shock.

Now, just because hypotension is a classic sign of shock does not mean that it's going to be one of the very first signs of shock. It's actually kind of a late sign, but just know the hypotension that you can see happening with your patient, with their vital signs, and all of that is a big part of the shock picture.

Then we talk about the hypoprofusion, the oxygen not getting to the tissues. This is going to

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