The URL above will direct you to an article written by nursing care people who are working to introduce hospital nursing personnel in their medical-surgical departments to a serious and often misdiagnosed problem for elders who require hospital stays, for any number of reasons.

The article describes the experiences of hospitalized elders who found themselves in a state of delirium which was not brought on by dementia, but was seen by hospital personnel as indicative of some form of pathology rather than by the effect of hospitalization itself in an elderly patient.

I have personally experienced this problem twice - once in connection with an elderly friend who needed brief hospitalization at the age of ninety, and once in my own case, when I was eighty-eight and needed overnight hospitalization for atrial fibrillation, to bring my heartbeat back into "sinus" rhythm - in other words, to a regular heartbeat.

In both cases, the experience was brought on by the prescription and administration of a drug (not the same one in both cases) which probably works well with younger patients - in the case of my friend, to reduce anxiety; in mine, to reestablish sinus rhythm. I am sorry that I no longer have a way of knowing the names of these particular drugs - but I do know that research by these people has shown that delirium in elders may be brought on by the administration of anti-cholinergic drugs.

According to the research in the above article, such delirium in hospitalized elders can also be brought on simply by the experience of hospitalization itself: e.g., if the patient ordinarily wears glasses, and such glasses are removed by hospital personnel. They also say that it can be often be avoided if patients are not awakened at night for various hospital procedures such as the taking of "vital signs" or the administering of drugs, rather than being allowed to sleep undisturbed throughout the night.

I looked up "delirium in elderly patients" and found several listed that connected this state with either dementia or Alzheimers - which may, of course, occur - but also may be incorrectly diagnosed by doctors who are unaware of the danger of hospitalization itself in susceptible elders. This was the case with my friend, whose plight was only discovered when the staff psychiatrist, a woman, was called in, and discovered that the patient's personal physician had prescribed a tranquilizer which often induces delirium in the elderly. When she was taken off the drug, the delirium ceased.

In my own case, the drug I was taking stopped me from sleeping, and, to my amazement, created an all-night series of vivid hallucinations of a literary nature. These appeared as a wide kind of translucent tape scrolling ceaslessly upward above my eyes on the dimly lit ceiling. It rolled rather rapidly, so it wasn't easy to read most of the print, but I did catch phrases here and there, accompanied by cartoon-like images, mostly of Disney-like animals, while the text seemed to be similar to passages from Kipling's Jungle Book as illustrated by Disney characters. Weird but fascinating.