Ventricular Fibrillation

There is one rhythm in adult nursing where hesitation is measurably fatal, and this is it. The tracing shows no organized complexes at all — only a wandering, irregular line of varying height with no discernible pattern. There is no beat to count and no interval to measure, because the ventricles are not beating. Ventricular fibrillation is not a fast rhythm. It is the absence of an organized rhythm. Individual muscle cells depolarize independently and continuously, so the ventricular walls quiver instead of contracting. A quivering ventricle ejects nothing. Blood pressure is zero, coronary perfusion is zero, and cerebral perfusion is zero, from the first second. That physiology explains why the response is so tightly scripted. Survival falls with every minute this rhythm continues untreated, and the two interventions that change the outcome are chest compressions, which manually move blood, and defibrillation, which stops all electrical activity at once and gives the heart's own pacemaker a chance to resume. Everything else — advanced airway, medications, laboratory studies — supports those two and never delays them. This lesson is short on...