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Engage with Grace Blog Rally

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

The original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.


To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here

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High osmolar gap and a low anion gap.

Our fellowship director asked me to do a lecture on osmolar gap. At first I thought that this was an odd topic as toxic alcohols, the standard reason for determining an osmolar gap are relatively rare findings and I was worried I’d be able to find enough to talk about for an hour.

I’m really happy how the lecture turned out. Not my best but pretty strong for a first crack at a new topic.

I structured the topic by looking at patients with low, normal and high anion gaps to go along with the high osmolar gap and started with a case of a high osmolar gap paired with a negative anion gap. I have only seen one negative anion gap and that was a case of hyperkalemia and hypoalbuminemia. This case comes from the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The low anion gap is from the unmeasured cation, lithium. The patient had a lithium level of 14.5 mmol/L.

Lithium is an unmeasured cation which expands the red box and decreases the anion gap.
The differential for a decreased anion gap.
The osmolar gap is driven up because the cation lithium is not part of the calculated osmolality but contributes to the measured osmolality. A unifying theme of osmolar gap is that adulterants that increase the osmolar gap always have relatively low molecular weights. Lithium carbonate does not disappoint with a molecular weight of only 74. Other intoxicants associated with an increased osmolar gap, likewise have a low molecular weight.
The case report then deals with the dialytic removal of lithium and the nature of lithium toxicity.
Here are the causes of an osmolar gap divided by anion gap:
Here it is:
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What is the electrolyte book for me?

I received this e-mail question today:

Hi

I am a second year nephrology fellow. I always find acid base and electrolytes interesting but have always looked for a good book which would help me get a better perspective on this topic. Are there any books that you would recommend.

MD
There is only one answer to this question. If you are nephrology fellow who wants to own electrolytes get Burton Rose’s masterpeice: Clinical Physiology of Acid-Base and Electrolyte Disorders.
You can find this and other recommended nephrology books at PBFluids’ Amazon Store of Knowledge.
Disclosure: I do receive a kickback if anybody every buys a book through these amazon links (still looking to lose my amazon affiliate cherry)
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Cool article on Hippocratics Aphorisms

The authors describe aphorisms as:

…terse and trenchant, facilitating maximum comprehension in minimum expression. The Hippocratic aphorisms are just that: concise, often pithy, and memorable statements of literal truths and frequently obvious wisdoms.

Sounds like Hippocrates would have had a ton of followers on Twitter.


This aphorism is probably the first description of casts associated with ATN.

Here is the article

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Cool site on eGFR and proteinuria

2009 Annual Evidence Update on Proteinuria and eGFR

This Annual Evidence Update has been created to update the evidence presented last year for the 2008 National Knowledge Week on Proteinuria and eGFR. You can read commentaries on the latest systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials and the 2008 NICE guideline on Chronic Kidney Disease, as well as see what evidence has been produced in the last 12 months for the different topics presented last year. Drs David Goldsmith and Edward Sharples have also picked out the Treatment Uncertainties from the evidence, which have been added to the UK DUETs database.

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Cool new (to me) word: Anamnesis

Learned a new word: anamnesis.

Synonym for medical history.

Apparently, if you are considering the diagnosis of HCl intoxication no fancy flow chart needed just ask the patient if she’s been swigging hydrochloric acid.