'They Want to Kill Me': Many Covid Patients Have Terrifying Delirium.

[elleng]

'Paranoid hallucinations plague many coronavirus patients in I.C.U.s, an experience that can slow recovery and increase risk of depression and cognitive issues.

Kim Victory was paralyzed on a bed and being burned alive.

Just in time, someone rescued her, but suddenly, she was turned into an ice sculpture on a fancy cruise ship buffet. Next, she was a subject of an experiment in a lab in Japan. Then she was being attacked by cats.

Nightmarish visions like these plagued Ms. Victory during her hospitalization this spring for severe respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus. They made her so agitated that one night, she pulled out her ventilator breathing tube; another time, she fell off a chair and landed on the floor of the intensive care unit.

“It was so real, and I was so scared,” said Ms. Victory, 31, now back home in Franklin, Tenn.

To a startling degree, many coronavirus patients are reporting similar experiences. Called hospital delirium, the phenomenon has previously been seen mostly in a subset of older patients, some of whom already had dementia, and in recent years, hospitals adopted measures to reduce it.

“All of that has been erased by Covid,” said Dr. E. Wesley Ely, co-director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center at Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Veteran’s Administration Hospital, whose team developed guidelines for hospitals to minimize delirium.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/health/coronavirus-delirium-hallucinations.html?

[cayugafalls]

1. The more they discover about this disease, the less I want to ever come in contact with it.

Please, keep the covidiots away from me.

[elleng]

2. and from me.

Thankfully, less difficult here than elsewhere: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10563653

[cayugafalls]

3. I fear my state, Texas wants to kill us.

We are being very careful, but the rest of the people here seem to not care.

Any service people that come to our house are not masked and we have to tell them to mask up or lose the job. We won't let them in the house at all, so we have put off projects for now and it is getting hard to ignore as time goes on. At some point we will have to engage at some level. So masks, gloves, sanitizer, etc...

Stay safe!

[elleng]

4. You stay safe too.

Niece and nephew in Austin; holding my breath.

[onetexan]

8. My friend's daughter had a baby couple months ago. After they brought baby home to her house she

didn't let anyone come inside except the baby's parents & her husband, not even the baby's greatgrandmother, who could only view the child behind a sliding glass door. The reason she gave was that if the baby got sick with covid the family would not be allowed to stay with the child in the hospital, and not even if he died. Very valid concerns but this is what we're dealing with now in the Lone Star state.

[Thekaspervote]

5. Hypoxia...will do it every time

[elleng]

6. 'Called hospital delirium, the phenomenon has previously been seen

mostly in a subset of older patients, some of whom already had dementia, and in recent years, hospitals adopted measures to reduce it.'

My mother suffered from it years ago, when hospitalized due to a fall.

[CatLady78]

7. wow

Presumably that is relatively rare. How perfectly awful...

[I_UndergroundPanther]

9. I suffered

Either deliruim or a psychotic break in the psych ward. It was very scary and strange and incredibly real.

When I came back to reality I had no idea I was in seclusion for like a week.

I hope I don't ever go through that again.