Best Practices
Delirium and Long-Term Cognitive Impairment in Intensive Care Unit Survivors—Has Your Team Practiced Its ABCDEs Today?
Fed Pract. 2013 October;30(10):14-18
Author and Disclosure Information
Dustin M. Hipp, MD, MBA; E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH; and Robert S. Dittus, MD, MPH
"I found myself being stared at by 2 middle-aged men in dark suits and bright ties. One was busily explaining to me that I was in the intensive care unit and that I was quite safe. ... I knew they were lying. For me, the reason I was in a bed, on a ventilator, hardly able to move, was that I had been drugged and kidnapped. It had all started in Portugal; at least I thought it was Portugal, where I'd been abducted. ... I'd tried on several occasions to pull the tube out of my mouth but had always been instantly plunged back into darkness. It never crossed my mind that there might have been a medical reason for my predicament..."