Anti-Psychotics…

At the end of January, after lots of back-and-forth between the AL community’s wellness nurse, myself, and receiving a new assessment for mom, I emailed mom’s psychiatric nurse practitioner. I was a tad unhappy as the nurse didn’t want me to contact the doctor until she had ‘current observations’ of mom’s behaviors. The nurse gave me her observations on January 19th and 24th. I wrote to the doc on the 31st.

The doctor, being his amazing self, wrote back the same day, and saw mom the next day. He, with hesitation, put mom on a newer anti-psychotic. With luck this will help with the deepening paranoia about her TV, remote control, thermostat, medications, and door lock. She’s been going from department to department in the community asking for help with these troubling items, but doesn’t have the ability to sequence/remember that she’s asked for the help. This, of course, puts mom in a tail spin or makes her outright hostile, and scrambles the staff into repeated and unnecessary sorties. No one is having fun with this, least of all mom.

Mom is under observation for side-effects from the new medication. While I don’t want my mother medicated into a stupor, neither do I want her in a state of constant agitation.