Hi Michael,
I had ICU psychosis, although my experience was different than yours. I spent 20 days in ICU after my CABGx5 surgery was complicated by ventilator induced bacterial pneumonia and antibiotic induced cdiff. I was sedated in a medically induced coma for the first 13 of those days, as the doctors and nurses periodically tried to wean me off the ventilator.
My ICU psychosis was filled with delusions and hallucinations, just like yours, but they were not at all frightening, although they were sometimes extremely frustrating. As an example, and among other things, I at first was convinced that I was at a hospital in the Bahamas, and that my surgeon was my old commanding officer when we served on board our ship in the Navy (I never served in the Navy). I also was confronted with an illegitimate daughter who I had fathered in Korea during the Korean War (I was a baby at the time of the Korean War and have never even visited Korea). I then believed that the surgeon (who also served as hospital administrator) and an abusive nurse were keeping me captive in a bed from which I couldn't escape, and I was trying to get my daughter (my real daughter) to get her motorcycle gang (not real) to rescue me. I later believed that I had a second surgery (not real) and I was recovering in the Seaman's Institute in lower Manhattan (I was really in Jersey City Medical Center the whole time), I was involved with a (fictional) dockworkers uprising in lower Manhattan, my daughter and her friends were teleporting through the hospital whiteboard system to see me, and to attend a Russian festival that was going on outside my room, the hospital needed me to attend a meeting in Washington DC to resolve some political difficulties it was experiencing, and one of my male nurses was Jesus Christ. Get the picture? I was stark, raving mad. But I was not violent and never had to be restrained (although the night before I was discharged to the rehab hospital, I did damage a metal cart trying to pull myself up to a sitting position from my bed (At least I think this was real and not one more hallucination).
My hallucinations ended the day I left the ICU and entered the rehab hospital. I did have to confer a number of times with my wife about whether a number of events actually did happen because so much of what I experienced seemed absolutely real at the time and not at all dreamlike. As an example, I was having a conversation with the attending cardiologist at the rehab hospital one day about my medical history and asked him if the records reflected my second surgery at JCMC. When he told me that he had no record of a second surgery, I needed to ask my wife if I had such a surgery and was amazed when she told me no. I had no idea that it wasn't real. And to this day, 38 months later, I do believe that the male nurse who I thought was Jesus, actually is a Christlike incarnation of the spirit of Jesus, to whom I owe everything for his kindness to me-and I'm a Jewish secular Zen Buddhist!
If you would like to talk person to person, my number is 201-256-7231.
All the best,
Ira
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Ira Reid
Hoboken NJ
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