Becoming Your Parent’s Hospital Advocate

If you’ve never been an advocate for an elderly person when they land in the hospital, there’s a learning curve.  I found this out the hard way when my Mom ended up in the hospital after a fall. What I thought would be a two-day ordeal at best, turned into seven challenging days.

I first discovered that since my Mom’s physician wasn’t associated with the hospital she was in, they assign an internal doctor called a “hospitalist” to manage her treatment. And if I didn’t catch him in the morning when he did his rounds, trying to get information from anyone else on the staff was nearly impossible! Shortly after she got out, we changed physicians to one that was associated with this hospital. Now she will manage her care if and when Mom has to go in again.

One morning when I walked into her room, a caring hospital worker told me that my mother needed more supervision. He said that she had gotten up early in the morning and walked over to sit down on a chair across the room! When I begged her not to do that again – we didn’t even know if she had a hip fracture yet – she calmly exclaimed, “Well, at least we know I can still walk!” 

It was then I noticed that only three of the four rails on the bed were up.  Her nurse informed me that I’d need to get orders from the doctor to put all four rails up. This totally baffled me, but I got the orders and put them up when I left that night. The next morning I found out that Mom had tried to climb over the side rails and fell out of bed in the process! Fortunately she wasn’t hurt. It was only then I discovered the reason for not putting all up at the same time – apparently it’s been proven that more people get hurt trying to crawl over the rails than if they actually get out of bed without them! The only thing left to keep her safe was to put her in wrist restraints at night.  I struggled with this one, but there was no other choice.

I also learned that if your parent suffers from dementia, it’s likely to get worse in the hospital, simply due to confusion that comes from being in such a different environment.  During the day, my mother’s manifested itself in a very sweet and humorous way. At one point she told me that the surgery (which she didn’t have) had gone well and they worked on her breasts while mending her hip and she couldn’t wait to get the bandages off to see the results! At night, she would become agitated and paranoid. I discovered that this is called “sundowner’s syndrome.” She refused to eat one evening, because she was sure that her food had been poisoned. It wasn’t until one of the nurses told me that this was very common, that I stopped wondering what was going on and accepted this as a temporary problem.

Ultimately it was determined that Mom hadn’t broken her hip and they were able to get her blood pressure back to normal so she went back to her assisted living home. Had I been armed with more knowledge on hospital procedure and the effects of a hospital stay on the elderly, it would have made a difficult situation much less difficult.