Paranoia - anyone else had the same type of comments?

[Snowsquonk]

My mum was in hospital for a month earlier in the year, during which she experienced about 3 days of delirium (fortunately she hasn't remembered this at all and I'm not going to tell her). My mother-in-law is in a care home with alzheimers which has worsened recently.

Both have said very similar things to us - my mum when she was delirious and MIL when she's having a bad day - it's basically "You won't believe what's going on in here, I can't say anything but just you wait, you'll see" - both mums, in different circumstances have said almost word for word the same paranoia-type things and I'm wondering whether that's just fluke chance or whether other people have heard something very similar?

It's idle curiousity on my part - it is what it is, the brain does funny things but just wondering how common those sort of comments are.

Just one thing I noticed from my mum having Alzheimers - she often thought her dreams were real & would recount long stories about the man who lived in her wardrobe etc. And she'd say similarly "The things that go on on this place!" I wonder if dreams go into the otherwise empty-ish short-term memory department. Long term memories were still very sharp.

That's the thing with delirium ... they imagine all kinds ... often quite disturbing and upsetting things that they feel they can't say as they are being watched/monitored in some way. There's research into icu delirium that's quite sad reading - often about forced orhan harvesting etc. So the mind taking the situation - hospital - and creating a scary backstory

Yes we had this. My mother in law said awful things about "the carry on in here" she accused people of having affairs and all sorts

Yes, on several occasions when my father was in hospital he experienced hospital-based delirium and came out with lots of very paranoid fantasies about the hospital being taken over by outside forces, or the hospital taking over our house (he wasn't too sure where he was, so confabulated), or people wanting to torture him or steal money etc. It is very distressing to hear but very common.

Yes, always delirium in hospital from my mum. She would be ok for the first couple of days and then it would start... often about the other patients unfortunately. Mum was very hard of hearing, so would speak very loudly. During her last stay the woman opposite (in her nineties also) allegedly had just had a baby and it cried all night. She was also warning others of the lovely sister on the ward ... or 'nurse Hitler' as mother called her..

My father has explained to me how many of the carers at-his nursing home are actually on community service, some for quite serious offences up to and including manslaughter. This sounds like fears being put into concrete form

In hospital, MIL was convinced the wards were staffed by scammers who were after her money. She wasn't really aware she was in a hospital at all, and a lot of the time thought the ward was a room on a cruise ship. In which case she was extremely rude to a lot of her fellow passengers. Nothing like her real self at all. Unfortunately this has continued for some weeks after her return home, and she still thinks FIL has somehow conned her into agreeing to stay there.