Decline of a lovely lady
Hi, Apologies if I have posted to the wrong forum (this is my first posting) as I do not directly care for a person with dementia but I am close to a lady who has dementia (my boyfriend's gran). The lady in question is 96 years old and up until about a year ago she was doing very well health-wise for a lady in her 90s. She was a bit forgetful but that's pretty much it. However, about a year ago she needed urgent surgery requiring a general anaesthetic. She recovered but unfortunately the general anaesthetic caused a significant negative impact on her cognitive ability (apparently general anaesthetic can do this in v older people?) such that she started to forgot what day it was and occasionally forgot if she had phoned someone so would phone them again - but she remained her happy self (the lady we all love) and would laugh with us at her silliness. Then a couple of months ago she had a water infection and was admitted to hospital where she was also diagnosed with anaemia (a side effect of a drug she was taking for arthritis). I understand that confusion etc is common with very older people who have an infection but her condition continued to decline even when the infection was cleared by the antibiotics. She is getting worse and worse, for example, she has become aggressive (completely not like her) and seems frustrated and confused a lot of the time. The doctors also told us that she has suffered mini-strokes in the not too distant past that are contributing. My in-laws think she has alz but can this be true? I thought alz was a progressive, over many years kind of thing? Like I said her condition only really become noticeable a year ago - before that it was a little bit of forgetfulness. Can anyone offer similar experiences? Thanks very much.
Hi, Apologies if I have posted to the wrong forum (this is my first posting) as I do not directly care for a person with dementia but I am close to a lady who has dementia (my boyfriend's gran). The lady in question is 96 years old and up until about a year ago she was doing very well health-wise for a lady in her 90s. She was a bit forgetful but that's pretty much it. However, about a year ago she needed urgent surgery requiring a general anaesthetic. She recovered but unfortunately the general anaesthetic caused a significant negative impact on her cognitive ability (apparently general anaesthetic can do this in v older people?) such that she started to forgot what day it was and occasionally forgot if she had phoned someone so would phone them again - but she remained her happy self (the lady we all love) and would laugh with us at her silliness. Then a couple of months ago she had a water infection and was admitted to hospital where she was also diagnosed with anaemia (a side effect of a drug she was taking for arthritis). I understand that confusion etc is common with very older people who have an infection but her condition continued to decline even when the infection was cleared by the antibiotics. She is getting worse and worse, for example, she has become aggressive (completely not like her) and seems frustrated and confused a lot of the time. The doctors also told us that she has suffered mini-strokes in the not too distant past that are contributing. My in-laws think she has alz but can this be true? I thought alz was a progressive, over many years kind of thing? Like I said her condition only really become noticeable a year ago - before that it was a little bit of forgetfulness. Can anyone offer similar experiences? Thanks very much.
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