I was at the hospital the other day getting my oil changed as I have to do twice a year. I was heading back to the lab when I saw the most remarkable sight.
A young man was pushing a patient in a wheelchair. He was an older gentleman with a bandage over one eye. He was swathed in something like a Hajji’s robes. He was immobile as a statue. Unmoving, even in his good eye.
He was frozen in a position where one hand was grasping at his chest and the other was reaching for the sky. His mouth was wide open and he had a look of terror upon his face.
My guess is just an elderly man with dementia, alzeimers, or some toher mental ailment who couldn’t grasp he was in a hospital. I work in a hosoital that has an atached nursing home, and the things our minds do to us as we get older is astonishing. Anything from making you want to constantly bellow at the top of your lungs, to, as you described, just staying in a frozen position. The eye injury is probably not realted, at elast, not as a cause directly. Perhaps the combo of an unknown (to him) pain, combined with an altered mental status resulted in what you saw.
The two words I can come up with are dyskinesia and rigidity. My dad had Parkinson’s disease and would sometimes “freeze”. I think the Doc actually used another word to descibe the episodes, but I can’t place it right now.
There was nothing we could do except wait for him to ‘thaw’ when this happened. The Doctor told us that to force him to move could possibly break his bone!
