Observations placeholder
Hip replacement goes wrong
Identifier
003654
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This is a posting from wisegeek. The ‘anaesthesia’ was morphine – it was actually a pain killer she was given afterwards not an anaesthetic although anaesthetics have their moments
A description of the experience
@anon244208: ….. When my mom had a hip replacement, she was fairly OK the first night, and then the next, was literally talking gibberish.
She got over that, then was paranoid and hallucinating. She was asking for her parents, who have been dead over 40 years, and crying that she would never walk again. She said the nurses had been inside her house and were talking about how dirty it was and how she was a terrible housekeeper.
When she had a terrible UTI, she was in rehab and for the first several weeks, thought she was in rehab at her church! And later on, even after she got out of rehab, said something about how she had been at the church for rehab, and we had to remind her she was never at the church. But she's fine, now.
It's so scary and so awful, seeing a loved one go completely out of their heads, especially when they were fully functioning before. The good news is that it really does almost always resolve itself when the person is back in the familiar environment.
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with how an elderly person's brain chemistry works, and that anesthesia and related issues really screw up their brain chemistry. I don't know that there's any medical basis for this; that's just a personal opinion I have.