oh my gosh -- she's back to her normal self! Her memory isn't so great, but who's is any more? Seriously, we thought she had dimentia there for a while, and got her completely off meds, including Tylenol etc. Everything except vitamins.

My sister made an interesting observation. I copied her email here. Ross might be interested in this theory:

"I have a new theory of Mom's hospitalizations.They seem to coincide with her retinal exams. She had at least 4 trips to the ER last year, and she gets 4 eye exams a year. For the last 2 hospitalizations, she had an eye exam 2 days prior to going to the ER. For these exams she's injected with a dye into her arm. It's called Fluorescite. I was with her last time but I didn't catch what was going on until it was too late to stop it. The eye doctors don't know not to inject into her right arm, her breast cancer side, so that's a problem.The Fluroescite is shellfish based and Mom's allergic to shellfish. So am I. I've had it for an MRI and had a really bad reaction. But the worst part is they shine lights into her eyes to photograph her retina. At this point I think she becomes hypnotized, loses her memory, etc.

"Here are the contraindications of the Fluorescite from drugs.com: Nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal distress, headache, syncope, hypotension, and symptoms and signs of hypersensitivity have occurred. Cardiac arrest, basilar artery ischemia, severe shock, convulsions, thrombophlebitis at the injection site, and rare cases of death have been reported. Extravasation of the solution at the injection site causes intense pain at the site and a dull aching pain in the injected arm

"The last eye doctor was a total total moron, and had a really hard time with Mom. When he called me into the exam room to help, he was having trouble with his computer, he was sweating, and he seemed more confused than Mom. Throughout her hospitalization I was kinda sorta thinking these bright lights shining into her eyes may have caused some sort of stupor but it didn't really kick in until I saw that on December 2 she had an eye exam and on December 4 she was hospitalized."