WebKittyn Warbles
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Goodnight, Irene
One of many quirky anecdotes one accumulates during an eight-week stay in a hospital. I had 13 roommates during my stay, the most memorable of which is definitely Irene.
Irene was an elderly woman in her 80's who came in one night in a bad state. She was suffering from God knows what and a heavy case of dementia on top of it. She would perk up at night and would literally spend the entire night screaming at the top of her lungs. For a frail old woman, she had some lungs. She never really yelled anything you could understand either, just yelled. They had to strap her to the bed at night and they would keep her bed outside the room right next to the nursing station.
As my room was right pretty much across from the nursing station I got a whole lot of Irene.
She kept tearing her Foley bag (pee catheter) out, which is painful and messy but it didn't seem to bother Irene.
They didn't know what to do with Irene. The 5th floor of Albany Medical Center is where the really sick people go, you can't put a seriously ill and die-hard crazy old lady who needs to be strapped down and likes to scream all night with just anyone.
One Tuesday they came to get me to wheel me down to dialysis as usual. I did my thing, got filtered like a cold-brewed iced tea and came back to my room to find they had removed Lisa (who was on a ventilator and clearly dying) and replaced her with my newest roomie - Irene.
What the.. How come you give her to ME? She's going to break out of her straps and stab me with a plastic knife in the middle of the night.
I questioned the nurses on their sanity and they told me I was one of the few patients they considered 'well' enough to handle being in the same room with Irene. Looking around the rest of the floor I had to grousingly agree but it wasn't easy. I remember when Darkstar came to visit, she spent the whole time glaring at him like he was the devil.
We had a grand time together, Irene and I. She with her nightly screaming (another reason I got her, they knew I was up all night to begin with) and the daily yanking of the Foley bag.
Turned out Irene wasn't crazy after all. At the root of it all was a bad reaction to some medication she shouldn't have been given. It caused the dementia. I'll be damned if Irene didn't walk out of that hospital with her family fully alert, aware and she actually said "Goodbye, Heather. Good luck." when she left.
Wherever Irene is now, I hope she's still alive and kicking and well. She certainly made my life a bit more interesting.
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I’ve been around people whose medications have caused them some pretty wild hallucinations. Your incident takes the cake though.
Mare Martell Stotler on 03/02 at 06:43 PM
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