I am sick of hospitals, having spent way too much time in them over the past couple weeks (though thankfully not as a patient).
It all started a couple weeks ago with a scheduled procedure for my grandmother. She had a stent procedure a couple years ago, but she’s still having problems with circulation, so they ran some dye through her and took some pictures. I drove over to her apartment (about 20 minutes) and stayed the night so we could get her there bright and early the next morning.
No sooner was I back from helping out with that, than my daughter developed a kidney infection and was in the hospital for several days while they pumped antibiotics into her. Now she gets to go through all of the wonderful procedures we thought we had left behind after she had surgery for this sort of problem a few years ago.
So my daughter gets out of the hospital last week, and all seems well for a relaxing weekend for a change when I get a call from my brother that my grandmother is back in the hospital and is acting goofy. So it’s off to Battle Creek again where my grandmother acted like she had a stroke or maybe advanced alzheimers. Complete personality change accompanied by delusions/hallucinations. She tells me she’s waiting to receive a phone call from people who have been dead for almost a decade, and half the time she doesn’t realize she’s in a hospital (she spooked a lot of family/friends by calling them and explaining that she was trapped at a funeral home and needed someone to come get her).
That was very scary, but fortunately it seems to have been a drug reaction. The dye gave her an allergic reaction and she had hives all over her body, which is why my brother took her back to the hospital. She hadn’t been sleeping because of the allergic reaction anyway, and then the hospital pumped her full of prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid which is known to cause such hallucinations and delusions (and occasionally even psychotic episodes) in a very small percentage of the population, and the effect is exacerbated by lack of sleep.
She’s back home now and she occasionally says something that sounds like it’s the residual effect of the medicine, but she’s about 95 percent back to her old self. My brother wisely confiscated her car keys until we’re sure she’s 100 percent, and we’re trying to keep as close an eye on her as we can.