Dementia and Medications - A Personal View

Sharon was a freshman when I taught her in the late '60s. She lived with her other siblings in a nice home in a new part of town. Their dad was a successful businessman. I always experienced their mother, Evelyn, as a warm and delightful woman: devoted housewife and mother; active in church, PTA and school fundraising efforts; always gracious, hospitable, loving and with a great sense of humor.

Yesterday I had a call from Sharon. She was responding to a message I had left on her home phone when I had been unable to reach her mother who now lives in an assisted living community. My apprehensions had been well-founded. Over the past six months, Evelyn had been in and out of the hospital twice, in two nursing homes, in rehab, and finally back to where she has been living for the past several years.

Evelyn was discharged, at some point during this six-month ordeal, from the hospital to a nursing home for some rehab. Sharon is a devoted, faithful daughter. Her love for her mother is expressed not only by her presence, but by her strong and effective advocacy. (Mary Hunt, theologian, would call this "Fierce Tenderness".) Within a week of Evelyn being admitted to this nursing home, Sharon saw her mother decline from a woman who suffers from back and hip pain, to a woman restrained in her wheelchair, drooling, defecating on herself, unable to recognize her daughter, and physically unable to maneuver the simple task of taking a facial tissue out of its box.

"My mother does not have dementia," Sharon told the staff. She asked questions; she studied the nursing home medical chart; she discovered that when her mother would call out for help that the staff would medicate her and physically restrain her (!!). Sharon took the list of medications her mother had been put on to a pharmacist. That was the core problem: a mixture of almost a dozen medications for pain, and psychotropics. Sharon immediately moved Evelyn to another long-term care community where the doctor literally weaned Evelyn off her toxic regimen of medications.

Yes, Evelyn DID have dementia. It was MEDICALLY INDUCED DEMENTIA and therefore, thank God, reversible. (The tragic injustice is that it occurs in the first place.) Sharon says "we have her almost back to where she used to be. I'm just grateful that she does not remember what she went through."

It has been a difficult journey, not only for Evelyn, but for Sharon and her siblings who have companioned their mother during a very long and difficult time. Again, thank God that Evelyn has children who, out of filial love, will look after her best interests. How many residents in nursing homes do not have children who will look after their best interests? Let me say, as a Catholic Sister that would be 100% of us! We Sisters must be those advocates for our frail elderly Sisters now and the younger among us, for us when the need arises.

Childless or not, as I said at the end of my last post, "We will either change it or live it.


© Imelda Maurer, cdp 2008 All Rights Reserved. Permissions: ilmcdp@yahoo.com