Dealing with the Pressure

This post is about resetting a blood pressure cuff to zero. A blood pressure cuff is called a sphygmomanometer. 
 
This post may be boring to most people but helpful to some. Pass it over if you aren't medical but if you do a search for this, there isn't much out there on this so I figured it was something worth posting about to help others who have a similar problem as I did with my gauge.

I have a Princess who is taking a Certified Nursing Assistant course. She needs a blood pressure cuff and has to take 100 vital signs while in the class. 
 
This means she needs to have a blood pressure cuff for the job. I had an old one that was sticky and leaking and a new one that didn't have the gauge or the pump on it. While taking off the gauge off the old one, I twisted the bottom valve on the gauge and somehow moved the needle off of zero. 

I looked online to see how to get it back to zero. There was one video on youtube that showed how to "zero" out the needle, but when I tried what it said, it didn't work. 

In his video, it said to move the gauge valve using pliers to move it. My gauge had two moving parts on the valve area. One was the valve itself and the other is a little nut that moves up and down to tighten the valve into place. The valve is attached inside to some metal diaphragm looking disc shapes.

That metal piece moving up and down, is what moves the needle showing the pressures. the nut has two little holes in it that you can put a large paperclip into to tighten or loosen the nut on the valve. By twisting the valve itself, you can break the valve connection to the diaphragm which can cause the gauge to not work. 

By shaping a paperclip into a "U" shaped tool, you can loosen the nut, twist the valve back to zero and then tighten the valve nut back on resetting the gauge back to zero. 
 




I have a video I did on youtube. Here is a link to the video. If you are at work and you need to do it, use a paperclip for the tool and see if you can loosen the nut. If not, you can use a "surgery clamp" or the handles of your bandage scissors to try and loosen the valve just a little in order to get the nut to move. Just don't move it very much or you could break the seal. 


Test the fixed cuff against a working one before using it on a patient making sure it is giving accurate readings. It is something to try if you don't have other options or are waiting on a new one. 

Funny that I had a "Pressure" headache today as I worked on fixing this "pressure" gauge. It must have been my day for High Pressure!