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Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Harrowing delirium afflicts millions after surgery, especially the elderly

(Click on the image for Muriel Dobbin's Washington Post article)

"It is a ghost disease.
More than 2 million Americans are haunted every year by postoperative delirium, a strange, creeping state of confusion that the medical profession admits it neither understands nor can cure.
It is a problem that affects the brain, divorces its victims from reality and plunges them into a state of derangement — and few doctors can tell them why. Indeed, physicians usually cannot even see the symptoms of this disease until the patient already is in its grip.
I know about this harrowing syndrome because it overtook me last summer after I was sent to the hospital following a fall in my apartment building. I had surgery to repair my hip as a result of the fall, but the greater injury was the delirium associated with that hospitalization. It turned my life upside down, leaving me in a lingering state of confusion, anxiety and befuddlement, flailing for answers."