My father, who is 8 years older than McConnell, took a bad fall at the end of April. He wound up in the hospital with three cracked lumbar vertebrae, and soon after developed not only pneumonia, but a persistent UTI. He was in rehab for a month, and between the pneumonia, the UTI, and being in strange places (the hospital, then two different rehab facilities), he started, quite suddenly, exhibiting signs of dementia after the fall: delusions, not being able to separate dreams from reality, unable to remember what day it was, etc. He had times when he was very lucid and “himself,” and times when he was, to be honest, off his nut. After a few weeks in that state, the doctors at the rehab facility decided that they needed to activate dad’s Power of Attorney document for medical decisions, as they determined that he could not consistently make such decisions on his own.
It took weeks for us to get the medical professionals to take us seriously that “no, he really didn’t used to be this way!” Finally, the UTI was stamped out, and he’s now been in one place – an assisted living facility – for the past three weeks. He is 95% “himself” again, and the delusions appear to be behind us, for now.
tl;dr: Just saying “he had pneumonia” may well not be the entire story, as far as his health or cognitive state. We may well not ever know the full story, at least while McConnell is still alive.