Just in time, someone rescued her, but suddenly, she was turned into an ice sculpture on a fancy cruise ship buffet. Next, she was a subject of an experiment in a lab in Japan. Then she was being attacked by cats.
The experiences are not just terrifying and disorienting. Delirium can have detrimental consequences long after it lifts, extending hospital stays, slowing recovery and increasing people’s risk of developing depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Previously healthy older patients with delirium can develop dementia sooner than they otherwise would have and can die earlier, researchers have found.
The virus itself or the body’s response to it may also generate neurological effects, “flipping people into more of a delirium state,” said Dr. Sajan Patel, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco. But then Temko’s respiratory failure worsened. His blood pressure plummeted, a condition propofol intensifies. To allow the ventilator to completely breathe for him, doctors had him chemically paralyzed, which required heavier sedatives to prevent the trauma of being conscious while unable to move.
The repeated nursing visits Temko needed interrupted his sleep-wake cycle, so he would often take daytime naps and become sleepless and agitated at night, said Jason Bloomer, an ICU nurse. When Bloomer asked, “Do you feel safe?,” Temko shook his head no and mouthed around his breathing tube: “‘Help me.’”He met with Kaplan, the psychiatrist, who recognized his symptoms as delirium, partly because Temko bungled tests like naming the months backward and counting down from 100 by sevens. “He could only get from 100 to 93,” Kaplan said, adding, “The cardinal sin of delirium is always impaired attention.
After the ventilator was disconnected, Rios, a normally gregarious man who hosts a radio show, only responded with one- or two-word answers, said Dr. Peggy Lai, who treated him. “I saw the devil, and I asked him, ‘Can you give me another chance?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but you know the price,’” Rios recalled. “Now I think I know the price was my father.”Two months after returning home from her three-week hospitalization, Victory said she has been experiencing troubling emotional and psychological symptoms, including depression and insomnia. She has been noticing the smell of cigarettes or wood burning, a figment of her imagination.
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