How to best answer this case.

i'm not in nursing or anything, but why are you guessing that something happened to her left ventricle when they told you that in the case lol.... considering how the left ventricle is responsible for supplying blood to the rest of her body, left ventricular failure will lead to decreased blood flow to the rest of her body which means hypoxia to these areas. less oxygen to the skin explains her pale/cold skin..

i'm going to go on a limb and guess her chest pain and "moist sounds" was caused by regurgitation of blood back into her lungs from the left side of her heart. if the left ventricle is unable to pump the blood to the rest of the body, blood will pool in the left side of her heart and cause a backflow into the lungs

again i'm not a nursing student, so i'll need someone to verify

If the left left ventricle fails, fluid will build up in the lungs due to congestion of the veins in the lungs. This can also cause Pulmonary edema. The moist rales are closer to Rhonchus due to obstruction of air passage by the fluids. Basically she's drowning in her own fluid.  The heart is not able to push the blood back out & it's backing up into her lungs.

So sorry about the confusion I was very tired when I  put in my thoughts down for the end of the case. I know it mentions her condition in her case I am just trying to figure out how the heart attach came on. Was it due to poor health or there must have been a blockage of the arteries for the left ventricle to collapse I guess I am just over thinking this.

Post Merge: 10 years ago

  thanks everyone who helped.

They only asked you to explain the reasons for her symptoms for a reason. they did not give you enough information to diagnose the cause... there are TONSSSSS of things that can cause an MI.... we'd need an ECG along with other tests in order to diagnose the cause of the MI..but according to the symptoms of this case, I doubt the MI was caused by a valve problem, although with left ventricular failure, she would definitely have problems with the mitral valve and the valve of the pulmonary vein (forgot what it's called) if blood was able to go back into the lungs, but the valve issues are caused by the failure, not the cause of the failure.