Allow me to introduce Joey

The VA has lowered his Oxycodone dose from 30mg to 20mg per day. Every 12 hours they bring him a 10mg pill to alleviate pain. And it works. Unfortunately, one of the side effects to this extremely powerful central nervous system depressant is that it can put you into a veggie-like stupor.

There have been times when we’re visiting and he is hardly there mentally. The drug makes him sleepy and it tends to slur his speech. The end result is he feels like he is drugged up – and he is.

A few days ago I was sitting with him in his room talking about this and that (mostly that), when he suddenly asked me, “Where did she go?” I asked, “Where did who go?” He says, “The little girl that has been sitting here for the past 30 minutes or so.”

Wow.

There wasn’t a little girl sitting with us. And I told him so. He quickly realized that he had been hallucinating and it scared the heck out of him. So he clicked the button to call a nurse and a male nurse immediately showed up at his bedside. They are really good at the VA and we have no complaints. It couldn’t have been more than 10 seconds from the push of the button to him standing there asking what he needed.

So my father explained to the guy what had just happened and we discussed it for maybe 20 minutes. The nurse said that hallucinations are not common, but they do happen on Morphine and Oxycodone and other such drugs. They can be more common in patients that have some liver problems, and my dad’s cancer doctor had suggested maybe a year ago that he probably had some liver cirrhosis. Maybe this was the cause. Maybe not.

We requested that this nurse put a note in for the head nurse tomorrow. And he did. The next day his dosage was dropped from 30mg to 20mg per day and it seems to have had an immediate positive impact on his personality or liveliness.

Today I visited and he was in good spirits. We spent some time outside sitting on the huge patio facing the mangroves that line the bay. There are a zillion squirrels scampering about all day every day – and they stare at you waiting for you to throw them some peanuts or other foodstuffs.

But the signs all over warn us, “Do not feed the animals! They will bite!”

Somehow we ended up with a small Ziploc of peanuts weighing us down, so we discreetly tossed them to the patient squirrels. I took a few digital photos of the little guys, so maybe I’ll succeed in posting them here. How can anyone resist feeding squirrels? They’re such a cool animal.