Harrowing delirium afflicts millions after surgery, especially the elderly. I know. It hit me and it took months to overcome.
Muriel Dobbin
Muriel Dobbin
Quote:More than 2 million Americans are haunted every year by postoperative delirium, a strange, creeping state of confusion that the medical profession admits it neither understands nor can cure.
It is a problem that affects the brain, divorces its victims from reality and plunges them into a state of derangement — and few doctors can tell them why. Indeed, physicians usually cannot even see the symptoms of this disease until the patient already is in its grip.
Quote:“You were out of it,” he wrote in an 11-page report. “You did not and could not respond in an intelligent way. Your speech was slurred at times. You lost words. You were not sleeping or eating. You told me you thought you were dying. You were grossly overmedicated, in my opinion.”
His assessment was that I had been suffering from psychosis agitation caused by delirium, which he diagnosed as an insult, an injury to the body caused when transient blood flows into the brain. He said he found little wrong with me physically, apart from arthritis in my left knee, which I assumed resulted from the hip surgery. Psychologically, however, I was a mess.
The second source of help was Mark Ohnmacht, executive director of the Cleveland & Woodley Park Village, a D.C. nonprofit, aging-in-place organization that sends volunteers to assist with everything from folding laundry to providing rudimentary computer advice.
He advised me — and other elderly people — to formally designate a friend or relative as an outside “advocate,” empowered to deal with financial and medical questions when the patient is in the hospital, especially in cases where delirium appears.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell