Can't Judge a Book...blah, blah, blah

Trench Warfare

Home

Report this Blog for Abuse

Syndication

Archives

I got a call a couple of weeks ago to assess an elderly man.

He was confused and "not oriented" (read: he didn't know who or where he was) and he was talking gibberish. In fact, he was talking so much gibberish that everyone involved assumed he was in some sort of dementia tailspin.

So they called me in. To, you know, save the day.

Or, at the very least get the little old man transferred to a geriatric psych unit.

So I get in the car and head out there, mentally ticking off the facilities that are most likely to take him in my head.

Come to find out there's a reason we actually DO the assessments.

Because literally in the course of an hour, this man went from making as much sense as Hunter S. Thompson in scotch induced blackout to being completely lucid. Which was just plain weird. People who are psychotic or suffering from dementia don't normally do that kind of thing. You can't just turn it off and on like a switch. (Sorry to disappoint.)

So I said something to the nurse about it. Her response? "Oh yeah. That was the narcan kicking in."

Come again?

(I won't get into the nitty gritties of that particular drug, but hospitals use Narcan to counteract the effect of opiates.)

She then proceeded to tell me that our little old man had some pills on his person. Ok, let's be more specific: Our little old man had Lortabs and Valiums on his person. A lot of them. And not only did he have them on his person, but he had managed to sneak some in the ER the previous eveing and in the hospital room that day. About an hour before my arrival, as it turned out.

The nurse then did some detective work and discovered that our little old man had received both prescriptions less than a week prior. In the course of five days, he had managed to ingest about 75 Lortabs and 50 Valium.

Oh! And she found four different doctors that prescribed him meds too.

Conclusion (Or, to use medical social work jargon "Disposition")? My little old man wasn't demented. He was a druggie. ->