Hello to all Protime users... Any of you had the following problem yet?
Am on vacation at the moment and took my Protime machine with me. Did a test last Friday and everything worked as before.
Did another test Tuesday but tested pretty high (6.1 Whoh, NEVER been this high) I knew why though because my vitamin K intake had not been consistant plus also have had some "schnapps",so I thought lets have a spinach omelet for breakfast and a large green salad for lunch to change that reading and then test again in the afternoon. That's how you can manipulate this and INR changes within approx. 6 hours after you consume vitamin K. I certainly did not want to call these results in to my doctor as he probably would have instructed me to skip 48 hours. Not a good plan as I metabolize Coumadin quickly and my INR drops significantly within hours. Anyhow, I did another test in the afternoon and followed the prompts. The machine would tell me to put in the cuvette and a second later it would tell me to take it out. This happened over and over; really strange, and I did not do anything differently. Could not make it work so I called QAS and talked to the tech department. They instructed me to recharge the battery, although the battery was not low at the time.
Next morning I decided to use a new cuvette from the same LOT # and everything worked fine to my surprise. What I believe was wrong was that the previous cuvette must have been contaminated somehow and the Protime machine rejected it. My INR was 4.8 but I am feeling MAVALOUS!
Am having another green salad with spinach tonight. Another Peach Schnapps sounds pretty good to me as well, but will save the best for later.
Christina
Congenital Aortic Stenosis
AVR's 8/7/00 & 8/18/00
St.Jude's Mechanical
Am on vacation at the moment and took my Protime machine with me. Did a test last Friday and everything worked as before.
Did another test Tuesday but tested pretty high (6.1 Whoh, NEVER been this high) I knew why though because my vitamin K intake had not been consistant plus also have had some "schnapps",so I thought lets have a spinach omelet for breakfast and a large green salad for lunch to change that reading and then test again in the afternoon. That's how you can manipulate this and INR changes within approx. 6 hours after you consume vitamin K. I certainly did not want to call these results in to my doctor as he probably would have instructed me to skip 48 hours. Not a good plan as I metabolize Coumadin quickly and my INR drops significantly within hours. Anyhow, I did another test in the afternoon and followed the prompts. The machine would tell me to put in the cuvette and a second later it would tell me to take it out. This happened over and over; really strange, and I did not do anything differently. Could not make it work so I called QAS and talked to the tech department. They instructed me to recharge the battery, although the battery was not low at the time.
Next morning I decided to use a new cuvette from the same LOT # and everything worked fine to my surprise. What I believe was wrong was that the previous cuvette must have been contaminated somehow and the Protime machine rejected it. My INR was 4.8 but I am feeling MAVALOUS!
Am having another green salad with spinach tonight. Another Peach Schnapps sounds pretty good to me as well, but will save the best for later.
Christina
Congenital Aortic Stenosis
AVR's 8/7/00 & 8/18/00
St.Jude's Mechanical
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