Dizziness - Orthostatic Hypotension: Fill & Download for Free

Orthostatic hypotension.“Orthostatic” means “caused by being upright.” “Hypo” means “low;” hypotension is low blood pressure.When you stand up rapidly, blood pressure in your head falls. You become dizzy and you go blind for a moment.If it’s severe or happens a lot, you may have low blood pressure. Get checked out by a doctor.

When they say, "Take your time getting up", they are referencing that you need to balance your orthostatic pressure by getting up slowly, in order to avoid becoming dizzy: (Orthostatic hypotension )Orthostatic hypotension, also known as postural hypotension,orthostasis, and colloquially as head rush or dizzy spell, is a form of low blood pressurein which a person's blood pressure falls when suddenly standing up or stretching. In medical terms, it is defined as a fall in systolic blood pressure of at least 20 mm Hg or diastolic blood pressure of at least 10 mm Hg when a person assumes a standing position.The symptom is caused by blood pooling in the lower extremities upon a change in body position. It is quite common and can occur briefly in anyone, although it is prevalent in particular among the elderly, and those with low blood pressure.We don't want you to become dizzy , disoriented, or to pass out after our bodywork, so we ask the patient to "Take your time getting up", which is to say, as quickly as you are able to, comfortably. That probably means 1 minute for most patients, 5 minutes for others. If it takes more than 5 minutes to regain balance for a patient, there may be other problems to notate and transmit to the referring physician. Fifteen minutes would be problematic, for both the patient and the therapist, as well as cause for concern, enough to transmit to the referring physician.

Back in the day before I was a nurse and very young (40 years ago), I had given birth to my first child and had a minor complication during the delivery so I was ordered by my doctor to remain flat on my back and not to sit up for any reason for the next 12 hours. So, I did what I was told. I had a urinary catheter in place, so I didn’t have to get up to use the bathroom.Well, when it was time, the nurse came in, removed my catheter and then told me to “get up and go the bathroom and wash up.” So I sat up and got really, really dizzy. She came back from disposing of the catheter and said, “why are you just sitting there, get in the bathroom.”I said “Okay, just a second, I feel really dizzy” and she got really angry for some reason. She said she was sick and tired of “you young women, you only had a baby, you didn’t have major surgery. I had major surgery, I had a hysterectomy and I didn’t carry on like you young women always do.”She was really mean and condescending, and all I could think of was I was so dizzy I wanted to vomit and I didn’t understand what she was on about, so I stood up to get to the bathroom, both to get the toilet so I could be sick and to shut her up.I only made it a few steps because I apparently passed out and I woke up on the floor to her trying to sit me up and yelling for help. Someone else came in and they got me in a chair. She then proceeded to berate me, again for being young and stupid and “acting like having a baby was major surgery.” She also said that she had just had a hysterectomy and now here she was pushing ‘heavyweights’ to bathroom like they’re cripples.”Mind you, I was all of 145 pounds and had only lost the 6–8 pounds of baby and amniotic fluid 12 hours earlier, not the 30 I had gained in the pregnancy. I was hardly a heavyweight.I wasn’t a nurse then, but later when I was in nursing school and we learned about orthostatic hypotension I immediately flashed back to that horrible woman and what happened that day, and I finally knew why I’d passed out. Looking back, I don’t know what her personal problem was, only she was really, really unkind - but more importantly, she didn’t seem to understand what had happened to her patient.Orthostatic hypotension isn’t an unusual occurrence, esp. when someone has been lying flat for an extended period of time, has had little to no fluids for awhile, etc… which meant she probably also didn’t know her job very well and who knows if her other patients weren’t harmed.She was just awful to me for no reason, and worse, she was a terrible nurse. Both things, I’ve always tried very hard never to be. No matter how disagreeable patients sometimes can be, I never give it back to them, even when I have to excuse myself from the room so I don’t say something back. They say everyone you meet is a mirror, they either show you the person you want to me, or the one you don’t. And I never want to be that awful woman.If she’d had any knowledge, she’d had told me to sit up slowly and sit on the bed for a minute and then to stand slowly, standing by to see if there were any further changes. She’d have taken my blood pressure, anything, but bark orders, talk down to me, and insult me.