Highest BP you have ever seen on a pt

[nckayaker]

Hello,

I am new to all nurses as a poster. Have been looking at posts for a year or so.

Anyway, my coworkers and I were having a disscussion of the highest BP we have ever seen. We had a pt come in and say that the BP on the home monitor was 280/110. It was 162/109 at the ER.

So what is the highest BP any of you have ever seen?

[DoubleblessedRN, ADN, RN, EMT-B, EMT-P]

My unit was dispatched to a residence for possible seizure activity. The pt was a 52 y/o male w/ no seizure hx, nor did we witness any sz activity, but he was unconscious upon our arrival. His BP was 260/150. He had an intracranial hemmorhage and ultimately died.

[moongirl]

268/142 he was 95 years old

lowest... 73/52. called the doc on that one!

[SaderNurse05, BSN, RN]

250/110, manual on a very good friend post-op. Seems the pump beat her to the room and the nurse "had paged the orderly" for 15 minutes...I went to the freakin basement and got the freakin pump. This happened 15 years before I went to nursing school.

[orange-rn]

Last night in our shock room had a pt with a BP of 278/177, hr 111. Pt went from icu status to being discharge home! Renal functions messed up. Had h/o HTN out of meds for a few weeks. He was laughing and joking with us. He was put on a Nipride drip for a little while and given po meds.

[mmutk, BSN, RN, EMT-I]

75/53?? we see these pressures all the time. It's the high ones that are rare in our ER

[cota2k]

33y/o female. OD on who knows what. B/P 54/37 on the monitor, manual 60/36. SR 70's t/o her stay in the ED. Highest 235/110. Waited at PMD for his wife to drive him to ED. The telephone report from his PMD gave me CP.

[mced]

300 patent: 2.560.237, ESRD dude

[ChocoholicRN]

don't remember the highest, lowest was in the 50's/30's, but the patient had been declining for several days and passed about 2 hours later.

[VivaLasViejas, ASN, RN]

I personally had a BP of 260/130 once.

It was about seven or eight years ago, not long after I turned 40. I've had HTN since I was in my 20s, so I've come to recognize the signs that my pressure is out of control---I get headaches, feel dizzy and "out of sorts". Ironically enough, I'd been trying to take a patient's BP and couldn't hear anything but my own pulse pounding in my ears; so I went back to the nurses' station and asked an aide to get the patient's BP while I took my own on the Dynamap.

Well, the cuff just kept pumping up and pumping up, and I thought my entire arm was going to fall off---then came the reading. I took it twice because I couldn't believe it. The second reading confirmed the first one by being even higher.........well, no surprises there, given the fact that I was also scared to pieces.

But was I scared enough to clock out and go downstairs to the ER, as I would've advised anyone else with a stroke-level BP like that? Heck no---I worked my 12-hour shift, went home to sleep, then went to my doctor's office in the late afternoon where my pressure was a relatively mellow 180/110. He put me on some new meds, which lowered it to a respectable 150/90 (a good BP for me is around 140/85), and eventually I forgot the whole thing.

Now that I'm older and wiser---pretty lucky, considering the fact that even young people are known to have massive strokes at BP levels like mine---I wouldn't take that risk again. Back then, though, it was nothing more than a game of "how-tough-are-you?" between nurses........how sick can you be and still function on the floor. I think we've all played it at one time or another in our careers. Who hasn't worked with a nurse who comes in with a temp of 104, or one with a broken ankle encased in a walking cast, or one who's shoe-puking sick and looks worse than her patients? For that matter---who hasn't been that nurse?:trout:

[JoeERTech]

276/145. And she was 95 years old, too. I figure that if you get to 95 and still have a blood pressure, you're probably ahead of the curve..

[mcknis]

Not an RN yet, but the highest I have seen as an aide was 300's/180 and as low as 50's/30's. Neither pt was symptomatic, but a rapid response team was called for the elevated pt. Those were scary times, but I anticipate more times like that will be coming. Always hope not, but always prepared for it when it comes.

[CoffeeRTC, BSN, RN]

280/168.....that was mine. Pre E with my first baby. I didn't feel sick at all....until they started the mag