76yo mother ran out in 60mph traffic screaming at the sky because "a voice" told her she would die if she didn't do it. Cop took her to hospital. They said she didn't meet criteria for mental health admission. They did a CT scan and said there was a mild abnormality and she should be scheduled for a MRA. She has not been formally diagnosed with dementia, just severe depression, ptsd, and grief. (PTSD because of her husband's death supposedly.) She's been having vivid hallucinations and terrifying delusions in spite of taking rexulti, seroquel, effexor, buproprion and xanax.
Why does it take so long to get the results of a urinalysis? We don't know anything about that yet. Yet another visit to the geriatric internal medicine doctor coming this Tuesday.
Her psych problems went from zero to eighty in 9 months!
What dementia is so speedy?
To answer your question, dementia does not progress that fast. She could have been having symptoms that no one noticed for a while but this doesn't really sound like dementia to me. The psychosis could be caused by the meds.
She lives in her home. I am sitting with her right now but I will need to get back to my home and job soon. She is under the impression she will go back to normal and she is rejecting my advice to go into assisted living or to at least hire aides.
If she was to be scheduled for further eval, wasn't the hospital in a position to do it then? It seems to me that her behavior dictated more workup, then, or discharging her with a script to have further workup done.
The questions you asked can't really be answered succinctly as we don't know what hospital, what was done, other than a CAT scan, and more specifically, why the hospital didn't schedule these. It's been my experience that hospitals have done this, but the pandemic demands may have altered ER behavior. Or the hospital is owned by a company that looks only to the bottom line as opposed to therapeutical behavior.
And on Tuesday, the first issue I'd raise is the cocktail of drugs.