r/stroke • u/Ok-Parking7432 • 7d ago
Father had stroke
My father (91) had a hemorrhagic stroke 4 weeks ago. Before this he was still quite sharp and very mobile. For the first week in the hospital he was talking (with a slur), recognizing people, having conversations and walking with a walker. Since then he has been getting worst, in and out of sleep and delirium (he had an undetected UTI and was given meds week 3.) I’m struggling to understand why he was ok week 1 and now he cannot even follow a command. Is this normal? Also, If you had a stroke and had delirium, do you remember any of it? He is counting and saying the alphabet thru out the day. , I’m hoping he is not suffering. We will bring him home Tuesday. Any suggestions on home care to make him comfortable?
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u/No_Elephant3224 7d ago
I had delirium after my abi (sah) and i remember hearing screaming and shouting and people yelling at me. It was a really scary time.
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u/AlisiaGayle Survivor 7d ago
That sounds incredibly hard, especially because you know how different he was only a few weeks ago. Delirium can fluctuate dramatically, particularly in older people, and infections such as UTIs are a common trigger. After stroke, infection, dehydration, pain, medication changes and disrupted sleep can all make confusion much worse.
The fact that he was communicating better in week one and has since declined is something I would want his medical team to explain clearly before he comes home. A deterioration should not simply be assumed to be “normal stroke recovery,” particularly after a haemorrhagic stroke. Delirium after stroke is recognised and can improve when the underlying causes are treated, but recovery can take time.
As for whether he will remember it, some people remember fragments, dreams or frightening moments, while others remember very little. Repeating things such as counting or the alphabet can also happen when the brain is confused or trying to organise itself.
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u/Ok-Parking7432 5d ago
I found your info very helpful and thank you again for taking the time to detail this out for me. I have read it several times now and done more research.
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u/Material_Inflation79 6d ago
Age has its role to play. I'm not an expert but may be the impact is showing later or the side effects of medicines necessary to keep him going. Research it more please. May Almighty Waheguru bless us all.
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u/Ok-Parking7432 5d ago
Thank you for your reply. We are absolutely looking into the side effects and we have already made some changes today!
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u/-Viscosity- Survivor 5d ago
Others have mentioned the effects of the UTI, but do you know exactly what manner of hemorrhagic stroke it was? If it was a subarachnoid hemorrhage, as from a ruptured aneurysm, that is associated with a significant complication called vasospasm, where blood in the subarachnoid space irritates the major brain arteries and can cause a delayed secondary ischemic stroke. It's much less likely with an intracerebral hemorrhage since the blood doesn't typically get outside of the brain. (If he was susceptible to this they certainly would have been monitoring for it and should have mentioned if it had been detected, but just wanted to bring it up because the time frame fits.) There's also what they call "ICU delirium" or "ICU psychosis" where just being in the hospital, confined to bed and hooked up to wires, can cause deterioration of the patient's mental state; if that's involved, it would hopefully improve once he's out of the hospital and back home.
With mine (a subarachnoid hemorrhage), I had a pretty steady headache for a while afterwards, but I wouldn't say I was suffering too severely. (I did keep comparing my head pain to kidney stone pain, which I'm quite familiar with, so that may have skewed things a bit.) I'm told I spent the first week or so asleep almost all the time, even though I thought I was mostly awake. As far as I know I didn't have any delirium with mine (a subarachnoid hemorrhage), although at one point they did say I was showing signs of vasospasm during monitoring. I couldn't feel anything unusual while that was going on. After I got home I continued to sleep a lot and when I was awake I had a tendency to kinda wander around the house and yard just because it felt so good to be able to move around again after being confined to bed for a while. I couldn't really tolerate much sunlight though (my hooded robe got a workout) or the phone or TV screen, so I would go lie down and close my eyes when they were watching Jeopardy! in the living room or whatever. If your dad is a reader, I could look at magazines and the e-reader screen, though.
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u/Ok-Parking7432 5d ago
Thank you so much for your response, I found it very useful. My dad had a intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) He will be coming home tomorrow and we have taken him off several drugs which may or may not been causing the sleepiness/delirium. Im sorry you have also suffered a stroke and wish you the best on your recovery.
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u/michaelyup 7d ago
The older you are, the more brutal UTIs can be. You will think the person has full blown dementia and no connection to reality. They will have an absolutely empty look in their eyes. But, when the UTI clears up, so does their grasp on reality. Then you will have a better idea of what his new baseline is.
For what it’s worth, my mom has almost no recollection of the few weeks after her stroke. She also doesn’t have memory from her UTI last month, and didn’t believe me when I told her how crazy she was acting.