From: "s.valentine" <s.valentine@insightbb.com>
Subject: seroquel
Date: Saturday, April 07, 2007 1:52 AM

Hi, last Saturday I took my father to the hospital because I thought he had
a TIA, the hospital kept him. The next day when I went to see him I could
not believe the state he was in. When I took him in after two of the four
hours we waited for them to give him a room he was talking, laughing and
wanting to eat. They said that night he had got out of bed so they gave him
seroquel. Today is the first day my Father was awake enough to say anything
to me and the reason for this is I had to fight the nurses on his floor, the
DR.who was on call this week for my fathers DR. to get him off of seroquel.
My father has not ate anything since last Saturday the hospital said he gets
choked. I know its because of this pill making him sleep 24hrs a day he
sleeps with his mouth open and the only water he is getting is from a small
sponge.(he is on interveinice to hydrate him) Here is the topper he did not
have a TIA or anything else but they are making him stay because he can not
eat. He could eat before they gave him all this medicine. My father does get
up sometimes in the night, I just deal with it as I feel they should of. I
can not wait to get him back home. It seems like the pill is doing the same
thing to your wife with her sleeping all the time. Is she eating ok? shirley
valentine

That's a pretty horrifying story.  It sure sounds like your
Dad's problems are hospital induced.  I've often felt
that last place I'd ever want to be if I were sick is a
hospital.

I'm not an attorney and I might be wrong about this, but
I don't believe that the hospital can keep him against
his will.  If he gets up and leaves with you, I don't think
there's anything they can do to keep him.  They'll
probably give you warnings and papers to sign
absolving them of all responsibility, but even if you
don't sign them, I don't think they can keep him.

   Alan

THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO DO THIS.  This is known as a "chemical
constraint", and it's as illegal as tieing him down in bed unless
he is a threat to others.  You were right to get him off that
overdose of Seroquel.

I'll bet I can guess why they did it, though.  Hospitals these
days are simply understaffed, and certainly not well enough
staffed to deal with a patient who has a dementia.  Given that,
you probably should have stayed there with him, even if you had
to sleep in a chair.  

I've always been grateful that at our small hospital, the nurses
are very skilled at dealing with patients that are irrational or
impaired.

my mom is in a home where the nurses give seroquel to "calm down" the
patients.  Truth be told, they give it so that they don't have to do
anything.  We constantly fight with the on call Dr. about this, finally to
the point of threatening lawsuits if they administer it again without a
family members approval.

While my mom has been combative in the past, she now calls the facility "her
little apartment", and has come to believe she owns the place.  She no
longer fights, but still likes to chat with anyone that will listen.  The
nurses (not all, so please don't take offence to this if you are a nurse)
from the weekends and overnights are usually the guilty parties.  Give 'em a
pill.... put 'em to sleep.

I would have  a note put in the chart that says all medications must be
approved by you or a family member, outside of the normal meds (i.e. heart
med, diabetes, etc).  Put an end to the seroquel.  Its bad enough that the
memories are being lost, why make someone lathargic as well?

OP said :. My father does get up sometimes in the night, I just deal
with it as I feel they should of.

Mary comments: I know how upsetting this is, but you have to recognize
that a regular hospital ward is just not able to deal with the special
needs of a dementia patient. They aren't staffed or trained for it. If
your father was getting up in the middle of the night, and was
disoriented or combatative (and most would be, given that he wouldn't
know where he was, how he got there, or who all the strangers were),
they really can't deal with him. Their alternatives would be to sedate
him, or put him in restraints to keep him in bed.

I've told the story about my mother in law breaking a hip when she
lived in the special AD unit. The stay in hospital in the orthopedic
ward was just horrible. They didn't know what to do with her - the
staff couldn't understand that she couldn't follow instructions -
their reaction was to shout at her louder and louder. The problem
wasn't that she couldn't hear, although that was a small factor. It
was more that she couldn't understand words or respond properly. The
nurses and doctors seemed clueless when it came to dealing with a
person who couldn't answer questions or do what they were told - even
when we were standing there telling them that - they would persist in
the yelling, like she would suddenly magically get a clue what was
going on if they just got louder or more vehement. They also couldn't
get their brains around the fact she needed to have food put in front
of her (i,e, they would leave the covered tray across the room, and of
course, there was no way she could get to it, and no way she would
realize that there was FOOD under that wierd looking tray cover).
Initially they brought her hard foods - and it wasn't a just a matter
of the AD that made those inappropriate - it was that she had NO TEETH
- she'd stopped wearing her dentures. Even an idiot could have seen
that for themselves, but I had to bring up the subject before they
realized there was an issue. No one checked to see if she was eating.
The tray would sit in the room until some other staff member came to
take it away. We quickly learned that we needed to be there almost all
the time, until she could go back to the AD ward.

Regular hospital is just not a place for a person with advancing AD.
You can't expect that the staff will know how to deal with them, or
have the time, training or inclination. It also isn't safe, given that
they can't be expected to supervise the mobile person if they wander,
get into the bathroom, equipment, you name it.

I know it sucks. All you can do is take them home or back to the care
facility where the environment is more controlled and everyone looking
after them knows which end is up.

Mary