I’m sorry to hear that. Have they said how long she’ll be there?
I discovered this very thing with my mother. Her original doctor had her on so many different medications (this was before her diagnosis) that she was a madwoman half the time. I had to track down her original doctor – the doctor in the city she’d had when I was growing up – for a diagnosis. He was elderly and had dropped to PT work at the hospital. He’d remembered both my mother and me. He was the one who took her off nearly every med with the “your current doctor doesn’t know how to medicate people your age, [mom’s name], you need to find a new doctor before he does something to you.” He also gave her the mini dementia “who’s the current president?” test which she failed with flying colors.
We found a physician at our local hospital who specialized in geriatric medicine. She kept my mother in relatively good health med-wise until my mother went to the NH.
To this day I blame that doctor who’d put her on all those meds as part of the reason why she had dementia. She never should’ve been on half of them, and one of them has been shown to accelerate dementia in certain patients.
Oh, that was a funny one! “Who is the current President?” “HIM!!”
The ER doc and I looked at each other and smiled. I would have placed rent money on JFK or Ike.
She’s still in the ER? The usual goal of an ER is to get the patient stable enough either to be discharged or to be transferred to a different level of care (such as a regular hospital room or an ICU).
That was while she was in the ER–at the 7 hour point. She got placed upstairs in a observation room after that.