IV fluids: How to easily calculate what your really giving.
I give this mini lecture quite often to the residents and medical students during the course of the rotations. I thought I would pass this on to you all as well. Question for you. How many grams of Salt are you giving your patient when you give a liter bag of 'normal saline?' So let's start with the basic concept of 0.9% Saline. What does the 0.9% actually mean? Well 0.9% is a standard measure, in this case indicating 900 mg/dL. So that's 900 mg of sodium chloride per 100 cc or 9000 mg (9 grams) per 1 liter bag of normal saline! My canned joke here is your giving NS at 100 cc/hr=2.4 Liters/day x 9 grams/liter is over 20 grams of salt but....you have him on a 2 gram sodium diet. Good thinking :) 🤦♂️ Ok so how many grams of sodium are in half normal saline? Well of course you would say 4.5 grams and you would be correct but let's look at the math. 0.45%=450 mg/dL x10 dL=4500 mg of salt/L of 1/2 or 0.45% saline. Now the deeper question. So how many MEQ per li