Started cardio..need advice

[Musicnme81]

Ok, so we started the cardio part of the semester and everyone is raving about how hard it is and how this is what fails most students. I also had rotation on the ccu yesterday, the lady was extremely helpful in helping me understand the basics to reading a sinus rhythm, but the more complex rhythms are tripping me up. Does anyone have any advice on how they learned to read them or an easier way? Thanks :redbeathe

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

when i started working on a stepdown unit i had a wonderful manager who sat down at the monitors with me and explained arrhythmias. it is all about the electrical system of the heart. when you are looking at the monitor what you are seeing is the electrical activity of a person's heart being recorded. like any other disease with patients you have normal and then there is what went wrong with the normal processes which gives you the diseases. with the arrhythmias you first need to know what the normal electrical pathway should be and what it should look like on the monitor. then, everything else that deviates from that is an arrhythmia and has been given a name. your job is to identify how that electrical pathway deviated. in general, the heart starts going wrong in the atria and it works its way downward. the arrhythmias are generally classified by being atrial, junctional or ventricular. and it's usually concerning where the electrical beat starts, where it goes and sometimes how long it takes to get to where its supposed to go. the heartbeat itself, the resulting muscular activity, is just the heart muscle doing what the electrical stimulus tells it to do.

on post #39 of this sticky thread: https://allnurses.com/nursing-student-assistance/any-good-iv-127657.html - any good iv therapy or nursing procedure web sites are weblinks i put together specifically for students to help explain and learn the basic arrhythmias. the weblinks for the advanced ekgs are on https://allnurses.com/forums/f15/helpful-information-ccu-other-critical-care-units-140706.html - helpful information for the ccu and other critical care units but i do not recommend that you go onto those sites until you know the basics first.

[Musicnme81]

I learned the basics on my rotation on Tuesday. The Unit Sec. actually had a neat little book and it was wonderful at teaching the basics, but we had no time to go further into the different arrythmias. Thanks for the sites. I'm sure they will help me a lot. : )