Reflections in a Glassy Eye

How PB's Personal Life
has been affected by medications is not a new topic. I've mentioned personal issues with my wife's medications, for example. Now the subject is PB's mother, the likely victim of a medication error.

Mom was rehabbing a severe hip problem, when the staff at the residential rehab place gave her an injectable anti-coagulant (not heparin - the name escapes me. Long day.) apparently without discontinuing her Coumadin. They also gave it IM instead of in the gut, where it's indicated. A hemorrhage ensued, accompanied by the usual complications of low hemoglobin, hypoxia, etc. A hospital acquired pneumonia followed.

The hemorrhage was stopped, and Mom recently returned to a different rehab place, to resume treating the underlying mobility problem. I might add that she has unbelievable insurance coverage, thanks to Dad's employment at another Big Pharma company, which ended in 1983. She pays the first $500 out of pocket for anything - docs, meds, whatever, and nothing else after. Not a dime. Can anybody beat that? I can't.

Since being in the new place for a few days, Mom has been "out of it" - glassy eyed, can't find the right words while speaking, and memory loss. This was a very sharp 79 year old woman who was taking college classes last Fall. There are a few different possible reasons for this - her hemorrhage trauma and associated blood problems may have caused some damage to her brain, she has had poor blood oxygen off and on, and her pneumonia continues, but you wouldn't know it without an x-ray. PB also found out about another possible cause - she started Zoloft at about the same time. I need to research possible adverse effects of that SSRI.

Anyway, what drove me to post all this was the reaction I had today from a visit with her.

People visit their elderly parents for a variety of reasons. They are dutiful, the visits are good for the patients, etc. I have a 96 year old in-law who is visited regularly, which is wonderful, but it's not for the sparkling conversation. PB visits Mom because she is an intelligent and interesting conversationalist. Today was very different. It felt like the dutiful visit from the son with all the conversation in one direction, while she stared into the middle distance, smiled and nodded, with no other reply. This was disturbing enough, but when I spoke to staff members about this, they seemed all too eager to dismiss it with simple explanations. It's the meds, or the PT has her tired. Sounds fine, but it's BS. She's been on meds harder than anything you can buy on the street, and was never like this. She's had terrible arthritis for over 30 years which has worn out her body, and was never like this. She wasn't like this two weeks ago. But the staff doesn't know any of that, and frankly, everyone else whom they care for on this floor is in much the same zombie state. So why should they be concerned about the mental condition of a woman they don't know anything about?

As I sat with her during lunch today, I looked around at the 20 or so other residents, and it occurred to me how odd it is that so many people, with nothing else in common besides their age and infirmity, could act so completely identical to each other. What I'm saying is that every one of these people had some kind of personality at one time - there were former jocks, geeks, princesses, whatever, sitting in that room today, and if you subtracted 60 or so years from all of them, that would have been evident. But today they are all identical, with the same stare, no conversation, nothing at all to differentiate them except the color of their clothes.

I've been in a place populated by people in a worse state, who are experiencing dementia, and I noticed that an old personality re-emerges sometimes in that stage. Bullying, crying, and other highly emotional states come flying back to these folks when their minds lose a grip on reality.

But today, my mother was one of the starers, and it scared me to death. This is not who she is. I'm not ready to lose her mind, or to visit her out of a sense of duty. This sounds terribly crass of me, I know. If her brain was indeed damaged, than there may be no recourse. But when she did speak to me, there was fear in her glassy eyes too, because she know exactly what she's lost. She knows she wasn't like this a couple of weeks ago, and she doesn't know if she'll ever get her mind back.

A shout-out to my brother and sisters who live much closer to Mom than I, and have been such excellent advocates for her, especially A____. She's a nurse who is making sure the staff and the doctors know that something is terribly wrong with our mother's mental state, that this is NOT normal, and needs to be investigated, not explained away. I apologize heartily for every time I ever called you a bitch, dear sister.