At home, his wife kept her phone by her pillow so she could hear him via a nurse’s tablet. “He would wake up and was confused and anxious and he’d start getting all worked up to where the ventilator couldn’t work,” said Mrs. Temko, who would reassure him, “It’s OK, breathe.”
His hallucinations included a rotating human head. “Every time it came around, someone put a nail in it, and I could see that the person was still alive,” he said.
He imagined that his wristwatch (which was actually at home) was stolen by a man who turned it into a catheter. The man played a recording of Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, and told Mr. Temko that because he recognized the name, “‘You know too much, you’re not leaving the hospital.’”
When Mr. Bloomer asked “Do you feel safe?,” Mr. Temko shook his head no and mouthed around his breathing tube: “‘Help me.’”
Later, he became despairing. “I did not know if I wanted to live or die,” he said.
He met with Dr. Kaplan, the psychiatrist, who recognized his symptoms as delirium, partly because Mr. Temko bungled tests like naming the months backward and counting down from 100 by sevens. “He could only get from 100 to 93,” Dr. Kaplan said, adding, “The cardinal sin of delirium is always impaired attention.”
Dr. Kaplan prescribed Seroquel, which he said helps with perceptual disturbances and anxiety.
Mr. Temko said another turning point came when Mr. Bloomer said that with months of hard work, recovery was likely.
An optimistic cognitive sign, said Dr. Kaplan, is that Mr. Temko can now describe his delirium in much more detail than he could several weeks ago.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2VpNuNZ
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