A pulmonary embolism causes obstructive shock by physically blocking blood flow from the right ventricle to the lungs. The video walks through an NCLEX question comparing four shock types, using mnemonics like "obstruction" and "vasodilation" to distinguish their mechanisms.
Let's walk through an NCLEX practice question. A patient with a large pulmonary embolism is being evaluated. The nurse understands that this condition can lead to which type of shock. Now, anytime we look at an NCLEX question, we always want to make sure we know what it's talking about. So here we're looking at a pulmonary embolism. So we have to understand what the patho is for a pulmonary embolism. So let's go through the options here, and then we'll think about that. So a cardiogenic shock, B, B, hypovolemic shock, C distributive shock, or D obstructive shock. So a pulmonary embolism. This happens when there is an obstruction to the blood flow from the right ventricle to the lungs. So keyword obstruction there. So for this one, the correct answer is D here, obstructive shock, because there is an actual physical obstruction happening from that right ventricle going to the lungs. That is a pulmonary embolism. Now, cardiogenic shock, this happens when there's a pump failure in the heart, so it's a heart problem. And then hypovolemic shock, that's going to happen with low blood volume, when there's low fluid volume in the body, not enough to perfuse the organs, and then distributive shock. Anytime you see distributive shock, there's one word you should be thinking of, vasodilation. So distributive shock is where the blood flow just can't get to the organs in the body because there's massive vasodilation. The big one for distributive shock that you're probably most familiar with in nursing school is sepsis. So here it's specifically talking about a pulmonary embolism. So that is obstructive shock.
