Medical workers of Reddit, what is your "that can't possibly be right, this machine says you should be dead" story?

So blood pressure is represented by two measurements in mm of Hg, the systolic (top number) and the diastolic (bottom number).

The systolic measurement is how much pressure there is in your arteries during a ventricular contraction (during the "dub" of the "lub-dub" sequence you hear for a heartbeat), and this number should typically hover around 120 for a normal healthy adult. The diastolic measurement is the resting pressure that occurs momentarily (the instant between two "lub-dub"s), and this number should typically over between 70-80.

Normal heart rate is between 60-100, and heart rate after, say, sprinting, can go up into the 140s.

So this guy's bp and pulse was more than twice as high as it ought to be. That much circulatory force can cause severe blood vessel damage and cause things like heart attacks, strokes, and other types of aneurysms. However he was not in any discomfort, and the machines were calibrated appropriately. So...yeah. Guy should have been dead or dying and he was just sitting there like it was nothing.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent