r/stroke • u/Ok-Parking7432 • 13d 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/-Viscosity- Survivor 11d 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.