Saturday; she had a hard night, yesterday felt like forever ago for her. Then has a good day, until you need to leave.
Created: 2023-03-11
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2023-03-11 (Saturday) - Hard night (bored, long, halucinations). Then she had a good day, until we need to leave
- Hard day's night
- Melissa has hard nights. She's got Hospital Dementia, along with CBS (Halucinations due to optical processing damage) that kicks in more when she gets tired. And she's bored (can't watch TV when she's tired). This messes with her reality. She was getting the sheets off the bed, and makes her truly scared at night or when people are leaving.
- She loves people, wears herself out when people visit, and then starts getting halucinations.
- The other day we got her to nap (because we were there), and she had a great second wind. But that messes with her Circadian Rhythms / (day/night mode). Then had the same terrors when Mandy had to leave.
- When she just wakes up, and you close the blinds (get rid of distracting light) you can turn on the TV, and she can focus on it. But she needs the light (blinds open) to get her back in rhythm. Then as she gets tired, she can't see the TV through the fatigue. Thus the TV is useless when she needs it to entertain her or lull her into sleep. And then her halucinations take over. (The space she's in becomes huge, and scary).
- She gets pain and cramped up, or ties herself up in things at night (drops her leg off the side of the bed, then claims she can't get it back). But she can move it during the day. And when I give her foot massages and leg work-outs, she's happy and it relieves all her pain.
- She remembers that the Cell Phone or Tablet are great entertainment. But they're too small for her to see well and interact with for now. So you give them to her, and she quickly gets frustrated at not being able to control them (her bodies betrayal).
- Night is tough for her. And you just can't be there all the time.
- Accomplishments That being said, she keeps getting better.
- She can talk more clearly and longer day-by-day.
- Today's PT was better than yesterday -- she sat upright on her own for 7 minutes. Stands (but it wears her out).
- We propped up her bed in a more siting position for rounds (w/Doctors) and was asking good questions, and we explained everything that's coming and why. (She's very cogent and there). She helped talk through property management tasks, and who was in which unit, and what to do with various things.
- We were talking about Gina and her elementary school friends that had a get-together, so we called Gina, and Melissa had a great call with her. And Gina could tell the differences from just a few days ago.
- Melissa doesn't recognize how fast she's progressing -- so we keep re-inforcing it. It gives her a light at the end of the tunnel.
My Fault?
We had a conversation where she asked what caused it. I mentioned that we don't know. We know it wasn't plumbing (her bypasses were good). But it was either (a) her electrolytes (potassium) was so far off that it caused the flutter (b) her electronics that fire the heart were off, and that screwed with her electrolytes. She asked if that means this was her fault, or she could have avoided it? I answered we (they) don't know. But (1) she's wearing the harness to get hints (2) we can do some blood tests to check to see that her potassium doesn't fall off in the future (3) she'll have the new De-Fib pacemaker to fix it, if it happens again.
| I wasn't liking the self-blame aspects of that -- of course even if it could have been avoided, she didn't know she was causing it (with some dietary or supplimental failure, or just being dehydrated), or she would have obviously avoided it. Just like if I knew it was a risk, I would have pressured her. She and Dr. V had talked about adding a 3rd lead to do de-fib, because they'd seen possible V-tach events on the pacemaker log (I think back around Nov 2021 discussion).
She seemed to want to make that her fault, or his fault, "If he'd just replaced it, this wouldn't have happened?" I really didn't like the "fault" aspects, especially on something we don't know. Heck, I could have demanded she get it when I remembered hearing something about that (so was it my fault?). Everyone wanted to monitor before over-reacting and causing an unnecessarily invasive procedure. So I was trying to divert her back to future ways to prevent it, rather than rear-ward looking towards whose to blame - because we each could have done more. And we probably will in the future. But of course, we didn't expect or want the heart-attack/stroke as the outcome. |
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