Again, I’m not there, but it does sound like delirium. When I was with her, she was trying to get out of bed to pee, but last night she pulled out her two IV ports, managed to knock off all the electrodes that they had moved to her back so she wouldn’t pull them off, etc.
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Once my mother got out of the hospital the delirium went away and she was back to her “normal” self (dementia). ICU’s are the worst for causing delirium!
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That was my experience with my mom as well.
That’s good to hear.
The last hospital stay, my father was pulling all his tubes out (oxygen, catheter, etc.). They some how restrained him to prevent it from happening (I did not see, so I don’t know how). He has since been moved to rehab and he is no longer doing that (he had never done it at his assisted living facility either.)
During many of his hospital stays (has had tons over the past 2-3 years), he has been mentally out of it (to the point of hallucinating). It goes away once he is out of the hospital. I think some of it is related to low oxygen levels and some is just being in the hospital.
I was talking to a friend recently. Her mother had a fall which landed her in the ER (so not a real hospital stay). All her brain scans were clear (no brain injury). Yet, when she got home she was sitting on the couch talking to her other daughter who was not there. It frightened my friend, but it was just a strange example of hospital delirium, she was fine by the morning.
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Did I already ask this? Do you remember what we’re the first signs of dementia in your loved one? For my very smart Mil it was messing up on her rentals snd a change in reading habits. Then she suddenly quit playing piano because she ‘forgot how to read music’. I’m concerned about a family member but hope it’s nothing
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My mom starting having trouble writing out her list for the market and not remembering the spelling of basic words.
Oh gosh, I’m having trouble with word spelling! Maybe I need to be worrying about myself.
My mom would forget things we’d just told her. Then she lost interest in shopping. That was serious for her. I really think it was repeated UTIs that started her on a slide.
In hindsight, my mom’s issues probably started well before any of us realized. She had reminder notes stuck all over the kitchen. But we really started to notice something was wrong when she began to have trouble with executive function … I think initially it was things like following a recipe. It progressed to having trouble with household chores like doing laundry, then she stopped reading the newspaper. Eventually, she stopped watching tv. She hyper focused on knowing date and time, I guess because she realized that she couldn’t keep track. She didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but she had dementia. She had periods where she would hallucinate. As those of you who have been through it know, it was awful.
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I was having a telephone conversation with my mother months before she had the incident where we knew there was something wrong. She casually told me that she was having trouble finding her way while driving in the small town she’d lived in her whole life. I didn’t think anything of it other than , well she’s getting older. She was talking normally and we had a good conversation and she seemed fine for a long while until one day she got flushed and had a bad headache while doing water aerobics. My sister took her to the ER and all they did was give her a steroid and tell her to check her blood pressure often. That night, she got up at 2 am and drove to town thinking it was 9 am and time for her follow up appointment. She got lost and drove over a curb and honked her horn to get someone’s attention. The police came and notified my sister. That was the beginning of a steep decline with very obvious signs of dementia.
Even so, for a while she was able to have long conversations with me that seemed perfectly normal, but they were mostly about old memories that she had. I actually enjoyed those conversations because I’d never heard many of them. I found out that my grandparents had been divorced for 10 years or so, and then had gotten back together. Never knew that before. But losing short term memories is a sign of decline and I wasn’t realizing what was going on there. It wasn’t long before her conversations were filled with long silences and strange statements that made little sense.
Then she had a major stroke in October, Covid happened, and she died in May. I think the time span of that First conversation and her death was maybe 18 months or less.
I’ve been having problems finding words for about five years. My husband told me that he had serious concerns that I was getting early onset dementia.
I’m not sure whether to be worried, as my writing skills are fine -I don’t have to search for words when writing. Don’t judge my writing on CC; I use one finger to type on my IPad so I don’t try real hard.
I’ve recently been diagnosed with sleep hypo apnea, where my breathing doesn’t stop, but my airway is constricted so I have hypoxia at night. My sleep test showed I was hypoxic for 7 hours that night. That, being depressed, and taking statins, is a more reasonable explanation to me for my brain fog rather than dementia.
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With my mom, it was a bill she didn’t pay for three months. In her defense, they switched her to paperless even though she didn’t have a computer or an email. Stuff was going to my brother and SIL’s email address, both of whom ignored them. 
She didn’t get a paper bill so she didn’t pay it. But when she pays a bill she puts it in a ledger so she should’ve seen she didn’t pay AT&T for three months. That freaked her out as paying her bills on time was something in which she prided herself.
There also was an incident where I was in the car with her and my dad, and she drove the wrong way down a one-way street in an area she’s been a thousand times.
I don’t know whether this is something you know, but I found it really helpful. As we age, newer memories are, of course, the most recent ones, but they also are the first to go. Think of it as a filing cabinet where you put new memories in the front of the cabinet, like how you might file papers. Things such as your birthdate and such are way in the back; they’ve been around longer. Newer ones, such as who is the current president, are in the front. We lose the newer memories in the front of the cabinet first, in reverse order of how they were filed – last in, first out. I knew my mom was advancing when ever some of the older memories were no longer there, like the name of her favorite game show, which we started watching and playing together 50 years ago.
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The less sleep I gave the more trouble I have finding words when I speak. I do worry but there’s a pretty direct correlation to sleep. Also, if I stop and think I can usually come up with the word. That also makes me think it’s not dementia. But it’s a bit embarrassing - “let’s eat (pause several seconds) breakfast”. 
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Exactly! They don’t even have to be difficult words!
If you randomly called my uncle with dementia you would never know there was a problem. Until you realized you were covering same ground over and over. Hard to get friends who only talk by phone to understand how he cant answers the phone, etc. they miss how he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is etc, how he can’t remember to call for help with toilet and how he doesn’t care if he has messed up bed, chair, clothes. Sad
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My mom stopped playing the piano, stopped reading (which she had loved) and lastly stopped writing checks for everyone for holidays because of dementia. She can still talk about memories of her youth at times but there are big gaps. Sometimes she says, “Ask dad,” as he had a lot of answers until he died in 2/2020.
My mother began having executive function problems – she couldn’t book a plane ticket for her and her dog, e.g. And she, a dare I say rabid liberal, began believing the World Trade Center attacks were staged by the government, and she started believing anti-Semitic tropes. I vividly remember telling her “you cannot say that in public!!” before I knew that this was one of the first signs of dementia. Her dementia has a strong behavioral/psychiatric component, and less memory loss.
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My mom also had issues booking plane tickets, making restaurant reservations, etc. Calendars were a challenge early in her illness.