Hey everybody welcome back to the Straight A Nursing

Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today and today what we are going to be

talking about are some electrolytes.

This is key foundation knowledge that you need to understand,

pretty much starting off early on in your nursing school career and then it will carry over and you will use this knowledge every time you just need to

just need to memorize the lab values that are normal for a particular electrolyte. And actually, the

lab value range is probably the last thing that you need to know about these electrolytes. What you need to

understand about each one is why it's important, what its functions are in the body, the signs and symptoms of both hyper levels and

hypo levels, so high and low levels, causes for it being too high or being too high or being too low, and then the most

important thing as a nurse, what are you going to do about it? So we'll see how many we can get through.

I don't want this podcast to get too long, so if we end up having to do a two-parter we'll do a two-parter. So let's start with

probably the most common one that you will be keeping an eye on for a variety of reasons and that is

potassium. So just for reference though I just said you don't really need to memorize this.

For reference, the average range is about 3.5 to 5.

Now the reason why I say don't stress about memorizing it, I mean you might have to for school for purposes of your

exams memorize the ranges that your professor wants you to know. But just knowing generally that

3.5 to 5 is the average normal range at some institutions

the average is 3.5 to 5.5.

Where I work we correct any potassium that's below four so technically four to five is is what we consider normal

So that's why I say the ranges are going to vary, but I have a general idea so that when you look at a potassium of 2.2, your alarm bells go off, right?

Or a potassium of 7, or 8, your alarm bells are going to go off. But

whether it's 3.5 to 5 or 3.7 to 5.3,

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