This is the podcast, ICU rounds.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Guy.

I'm an associate professor of surgery and director at the Burns Center at the Vanderbilt University of School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Welcome back to surgery ICU rounds.

And in this episode, we're going to talk about the interpretation of arterial blood gases.

This is going to be a very introductory talk.

And it's important when we talk about arterial blood gases that we look at that word, the interpretation.

Because unlike when you have somebody who has, a, you look at their hemoglobin

come back, comes back, and the hemoglobin is 7, well, it's pretty clear what's going on there.

They're anemic.

Now, there's a lot of reasons why they're anemic, but you know that hemoglobin 7 is indicative

of a particular problem.

Arterial blood gases are more challenging to most and perhaps could be even misleading in that

there are several variables on that arterial blood gas.

When we get arterial blood gas, we get things like the arterial pH.

We get the partial pressure of carbon dioxide.

We get the partial pressure of oxygen.

We should get the bicarbonate as well.

And typically that's a calculated bicarbonate.

And off and off, we get a base deficit.

And depending on how your particular institution orders them or how you order them, you'll also get a serum lactate.

How you take all of those tests on that arterial blood gas, all those results,

...