This week on Inside EMS, cardiology takes center stage as hosts Chris Cebollero and Kelly Grayson welcome back paramedic student April, who’s deep in the struggle of making sense of heart blocks and junctional rhythms. Using her real-time questions as a guide, they break down complex concepts into something far more manageable — focusing on EKG basics, conduction pathways and what “normal” should actually look like before things go sideways.
The conversation leans on practical frameworks, including Kelly’s three-question method for identifying AV blocks, while Chris reinforces the importance of understanding the “why” behind the rhythms. From dropped beats to inverted P waves, the episode connects physiology to pattern recognition in a way that helps the chaos start to click.
Quotable takeaways
“The AV node is the gatekeeper. It’s the toll booth. Okay, you got to give me toll. It costs you 50 cents if you want to send a signal to the ventricles.”
“When you look at EKG paper, no matter what EKG machine you’re looking at, EKG paper is all formatted the same way, and it moves the same speed through the printer. It moves at 25 millimeters a second. Everything in the horizontal plane on an EKG paper represents time.”
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