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Originally Posted by just_jo
My youngest daughter has all the issues, unfortunately. When she was 14 she was diagnosed with scoliosis, then at 15 she found out she was anaphylactic to carrots and allergic to almost every type of pollen/dust/nuts and more and had asthma (had no idea that cough she had was asthma!) (she now has weekly allergy shots) and then a year later she was diagnosed with myoclonic seizures - we thought the tremors and shaking and jerking had to do with her back and even her pediatrician was baffled. An EEG said otherwise. So that led us down the road to seizure meds. Some of them can make you have intrusive thoughts. They switched her meds and she lost 12 pounds in less than 2 weeks (and she's not a big girl - she was down to 95 pounds) and I couldn't get the doctor's office to return my phone calls to get help to switch her back to the original meds. VERY, VERY, long story short - finally got the nurse prac's nurse to talk to us, she talked to my daughter for 30 seconds at most, determined her to be suicidal and had us take her to the emergency room and told us they would help us get her back onto the original meds. Got to the ER and they locked us in a room, wouldn't believe anything we said, said that she could be having these thoughts on her own. Would not listen to me about the problems with the weight loss or anything else. Wouldn't let us leave. Finally told me they were going to transfer her to another hospital to regulate her meds (LIE) which we believed. Transferred her by ambulance at 3am and proceeded to take our phones and lock us in a room. Took my daughter from me and locked her up and didn't give her any meds...she started having seizures. They called me as they are not allowed to give any meds without my consent and wanted to give her the meds the were causing the intrusive thoughts. I had to hunt down her old neurologist to get him to contact the other doctors in the facility to give her old meds as the nurse practitioner that prescribed the meds that gave her those thoughts told me they could no longer help her. The only blessing that came out of this was I had a blood pressure monitor visit with my OBGYN a few days later and I fell apart telling her what we were going through and that I was trying to get her an appointment at Oshner's in NOLA. Come to find out my Dr. best friend is a neurologist. She text her what was going on and we had an appointment with her 24 hours later. They released her from the facility the next day with the diagnosis of Secondary depression due to medication. ABSOLUTELY DUH!!! I told them that. So now she's seeing a therapist because she has some minor PTSD from being taken from her home and locked up for a week. So the takeaway from this for us is...don't ever tell the doctor that prescribed you meds with the side effect of suicidal thoughts that you are having them...you might just find yourself locked in a psych ward without help. If I thought for one minute my daughter was actually suicidal I would have locked her up myself. I knew 100% it was the medication and that she just needed to be taken off of it. I also knew that with seizure meds you don't just quit them cold turkey and THAT IS WHAT THEY DID!!! The seizures were so bad they were going to transfer her to another hospital. An absolute horror story with all that. The therapist that she sees now is also horrified at what happened. And of course, we have the hospital bill for it all too.
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Wow, what a nightmare that was for all of you. America is the most over medicated country in the world, which is scary in and of itself, but some of the adverse reactions to those meds is downright terrifying. And mental health issues are a horror all their own.
As my mom slipped farther and farther into dementia, she because aggressive in certain circumstances, she couldn't speak, so she would growl and snap at people like she was going to bite them if they were bothering her, and the nursing home would ship her to the mental hospital. I kept telling them that my mom had been molested as a child, so no male nurses on person care and to keep her covered at all times, because she felt vulnerable naked and was afraid, which is why she growled. Even in the shower, I would put a towel over her and clean her underneath it. The towel got soaked, but so what.
I struggled to get people to listen to me, even though I was her guardian and knew what I was talking about. We finally moved her to a different nursing home rather than having her go back and forth to the mental ward all the time and the staff there listened to me. They even worked with mom to get her to trust the male nurses so they could help her when needed. It look a little time and patience, but they did it and it was worth it for them, me and especially my mom. She was lost, confused and scared and in need of kindness and understanding, not the mental ward.
Seriously I almost punched a nurse in the first nursing home right in the face because she was such a b!#ch and called my mom crazy and pinched her. I saw her do it and called her out on it because that kind of behavior has no place in health care. You can believe I filed a long list of complaints against that woman, took a photo of my mom's arm where it was bruised and made sure that she was properly discipline, ie. I got her butt fired. Dementia is hard and most of the time the patient is pretty helpless so being left with someone who gets frustrated and pinches is not acceptable.
I know that there are some really wonderful people in health care doing a fantastic job every day, but there are also ones who suck. It isn't a job I would want to do at all because I do not have the patience for it. I took care of both of my parents and it was super hard and they were my parents who I loved. Doing that for a stranger, no way. You could not pay me enough.