Yesterday night, I was on the phone with my Great Aunt. As if often the case with family members you haven’t seen in a long time, we began with general pleasantries. “How are you?” she said. I told her about school. “How are you?” I returned. She told me about her walk.
About a week ago, my aunt was walking around her block in Michigan when “the worse feeling came over” her. She began to feel faint and dizzy. She tried to make her way home as fast as she could. As she stumbled onward, she said she had a “hallucination.” She told me—quite calmly may I add—that she saw an old, hunched-over woman draped in a black cloak. The one thing that really caught her attention was that the woman had extremely small feet. “You know how I have really big feet, right?” she said as if this factor meant something more than was privy to me. The way she described it was as if the woman was her, but her description was filled with ambiguity and I wasn’t entirely certain. She told me that this woman was walking so fast, her feet flying underneath her. My aunt said this was impossible because she herself was incapable of walking this fast. Her story was much of a blur to me as the world was a blur to her at that time.
My aunt was unable to make it home before she fainted. She told me she found a fence and grabbed onto it, and then the next thing she knew, she was lying on the cold sidewalk. “I remember hoping for someone to find me,” she said. “It was quite scary.” But a man ended up finding her. He got his wife, and they helped her up and got her a chair to sit on outside. Once she was feeling better, she stated she would go home. The man insisted on driving her, but she refused, informing them she lived only three houses down. Like the good Samaritans they were, they walked with her and waited until she was safely inside.
What’s the point of this chilling vignette? When my aunt went to the hospital, she found out she had a UTI. According to an article by the Alzheimer’s Society, “Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and Dementia,” a UTI of urinary tract infection “is usually caused by bacteria entering the urinary tract via the urethra – the tube that allows the passage of urine from the bladder to outside the body” (2). UTI’s are more common among the elderly because when the flow of urine is weaker, they are less likely to fully empty their bladder, resulting in increased bacteria (2).
Apparently, elderly citizens who have a UTI are also prone to hallucinations. “I never considered myself as elderly before!” my aunt joked. It is common among the elderly to experience what is known as “delirium” or an “acute confusional state” (8) from a UTI. The symptoms of which include, “agitation or restlessness, increased difficulty concentrating, hallucinations or delusions, or becoming unusually sleepy or withdrawn” (italics added).
When I originally heard my aunt use the term ‘hallucination’ and ‘UTI’ in the same sentence, I was the one who was in a confused state. I had never correlated the two before, which caused a response of shock to overcome me when she told me about her hallucination. At first, I was skeptical; maybe the old woman was actually there and my aunt’s world was spinning so she got the impression that she was hallucinating? Though I’ll never know the truth, the knowledge that a UTI can cause such hallucinations made me want to inform others in case something similar happens to them or their loved ones.
In order to prevent UTIs, the article recommends your drink a lot of water, not hold urine in the bladder for too long, maintain good hygiene, and practice safe sex. For more tips, visit UTIs and Dementia. And the next time an elderly loved one experiences a hallucination, suggest getting tested for a UTI! The two go hand-in-hand when it comes to our beloved seniors.