My dad’s pancreas burst five years or so ago, which basically caused multiple organ failure — kidneys, liver, lungs. He was on dialysis and a ventilator for weeks, the doctors told us he had about a 20% chance of surviving.

He experienced what this article is talking about — icu psychosis.

He thought that he had been kidnapped, that he was being tortured, that I was trying to kill him and replace him. He begged me for mercy, he apologized for anything he did to me. And I was just standing there telling him he was going to be okay. He didn’t know who I was a lot of the time. It was terrifying to watch.

Eventually they put him into an induced coma when they put him on a ventilator, but even after they woke him up, it took a week for him to realize who he was and who we were and what had happened to him. He kept begging us to take him home.

Every time he woke up, we had to tell him where he was, who we were, what happened to him, what year it was what day it was.

It really took him 6 months to get anything close to who he was when he went in and he’s still not completely the same person. The light went out in some ways and never came back in again.