Things that are not there - BEFORE Hallowe'en!
My Mum sees dead people! Seriously! I never thought I'd have a chance to work that line into conversation! Well, not just dead people, sometimes she wakes up with them, and all sorts of things. Now, I have talked extensively with her docs, and been over absolutely everything she takes, and there is just No Reason for it. She also absolutely doesn't lean towards ALZ, ( In fact, much of the time she is pretty darned sharp - can do huge numbers in her head, and remember any phone number ever issued. ) But if dementia is ... Well, just plain craziness, then yes. Every single day she wakes up and tells me who she woke up with in bed today. Dads been dead for four or five years, and often its him, which she found rather comforting, so I just let that go. No bones bodies, gore or anysuch - it's very vivid, and he looks just like he did everyday. When she touches it, it disappears, just like in the movies. But sometimes it's scary, some man she doesn't know, like a hobo. Sometimes has really BAD, vivid dreams, too. She's had a couple of strokes, my DH and I actually saw a bad one - on the way to take a cruise some years ago! And I ought to mention this : Last December I was still in Québèc, and she had 16 hour/day help 4 days a week. She falls down a lot whether I'm here or not, and when I lost her for a week and couldn't find her, I was hysterical, and booking a flight home. Then found out from a neighbour that she had been taken to the psych ward, and then a pretty terrible NH. What happened : One night she was in her den, when suddenly she thought this guy was in the room too, taunting her. I have this old friend that she just despises, and that's who she thought it was. She picked up some object, thought it was a baseball bat, and began swinging - All the way out into the dark driveway. ( Mums does NOT drink - EVER! ) A neighbour jut happened this and called an ambulance. It seemed like she got better, she's been home from there since January. I'm trying to help her, I don't want her to see scary things. Mums is superstitious and doesn't understand Catholiscm, she thinks it's all very mysterious. So one day we went to her bed, and I held a little ceremony. I made the sign of the cross, said some different prayers, sprinkled the bed with Holy water, and told her with supreme confidence that there would be no more scary ghosts. Now, either it was a supergreat placebo effect, or it really worked ( ! ), because she hasn't had one more scary ghost! Several nights ago she swears she saw a man in a raincoat ( no sign of rain in the forecast ) from an upstairs window at 3am. It's important I know if this is true, because it so happens that my neighbourhood group has advised me that we have had a number of break-ins lately. In this case, I'm inclined to believe her, but I don't know about reporting it, because she might not be all that credible. Have these strange hallucinations happened to anyone else -- Without some kind of explainable reason?
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I understand that your mom sounds lucid. My mother is STILL lucid. But dementia robs folks of the ability to reason, not the ability to sound lucid. I was totally done in y my mom's considerable verbal skills for about a year. Eventually, I noticed that she was arriving at conclusions that made no sense to me.
Feel free to ignore this, but I would further investigate dementia.
Misunderstanding was all cleared up, and now they claim she was never there! So no I haven't, but in this case, I DO believe her account, it makes sense to me, sure didn't sound too flattering, and she was *quite* lucid when she told me about it - and she has told the exact same story about three times, now.
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Were you able to speak to the doctors who treated your mom during her "episode", or are you relying on her reporting? I found that my mother became an extremely unreliable reporter of her doctor visits, telling us that everything was fine, when in fact they weren't. But mom didn't really understand what the doctor was telling her. So you might want to check with the focs who daw her.
I would see if you can get her a workup at a teaching hospital geriatric neurology/neuropsych department.