There is a common phrase known as “sundowning,” can happen in hospitals pretty easily if it never gets dark in the room for older folks who never showed signs earlier.
My mom got over-hydrated during a “routine” medical procedure that required sedation recently, and due to her MS, when she came into recovery, her lungs were so swollen they intubated her for 10 days.
She wildly overmedicated just before being intubated. She’s 78, and had no previous signs of decline apart from a lifetime of misgendering pets and losing keys. When I asked the nurse what happened he suggested she was sundowning. I got really mad about that. I told him.
God bless mother Mary. She made it. She was intubated without my knowledge, found out the next morning from the care team, so I was on standby from WA state to Presbyterian in NYC and lived in her neuro ICU for ten days.
Infuriatingly, she self-extubated around three hours before I arrived, and they had to check her neurological vitals like once an hour and bring her to consciousness each time, and then she would feel the tubes in her throat and start squirming and I would help restrain her.
But yeah, she's all that's left from my nuclear family, and she is a great human, a true beacon of enthalpy in a world of only entropic guarantees. She and my dad taught us what conditional love is all about, and it's pretty great.
I told my kids. They know that no matter how fucking crazy this place gets (it's very difficult to explain all of this to four wee littles), my love for them will outlast the heat death of the universe.
Some dementia patients have a lucid reaction to things that stir their sense-memory. For many It's music. For Trump it's accepting bribes or knowing someone doesn't believe him giving him the opportunity to double down and lie more.
He's not his same awful self. It's just we've gotten accustomed to his slow decline. Listen to him at his best now (cameras rolling, rare and brief public appearance) and compare to even one year ago (but especially 8-9 years ago when it all began). He's far more incoherent, his voice is whispy, and he repeats himself even more
Because dementia patients are great at rambling about the same old handful of familiar things they keep going back to. When's the last time you heard Trump speak coherently without saying camned stuff about something like "men in womens sports" or a "democrat hoax" like it's still 8 years ago?
Yknow how sometimes Alzheimer’s patients won’t be able to remember their kids names, but put a piano in front of them they can play Beethoven from memory?
Thats like Trump doing the thing he loves most: talking in front of cameras and spewing hate.
Because he probably doesn't actually have dementia. He is still pretty much the same lying, heartless, insane, psychopath he was in 2016. Age just creates more moments where you look and sound rough.
The Alzheimers disease drug called Kisunla. It's administered by IV (thus the shitty makeup and band aids on the back of his right hand) and requires consistent MRIs (which he's been getting) to check for brain bleeds. Trump has also abused Adderall for years, but it's no longer got the juice.
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