He walked onto that ward and eight days later he could not stand up on his own. Is that just what a week in bed does?

#1ron-at-home(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)July 2, 2026, 7:58 am

He went in on his frame. Slowly, and with me hovering, but he walked in through the door under his own steam and he was chatting to the porter.

Eight days later he came home and could not get out of a chair without two of us. Nothing went wrong. The infection was treated, everybody was pleasant, the notes say he made good progress. And yet the man who came home is not the man who went in, and nobody on that ward seemed to think this was worth remarking on.

I have spent the last fortnight doing the standing up and sitting down with him and being frightened, and I keep being told it is to be expected after a week in bed. Is it? Because if it is expected then somebody could have expected it out loud while he was still in there.

#2dee1972(Joined Apr 2025 · 24 posts)July 2, 2026, 9:21 am

Exactly the same with my mother in January and I did not have a word for it either.

What I did not know at the time is that you can ask, while they are still on the ward, whether the physio has seen them and whether they can be got up for meals. I assumed somebody was deciding that. Nobody was.

#3tomsdaughter(Joined Jan 2025 · 31 posts)July 2, 2026, 1:40 pm

The shoes thing sounds trivial and is not. Mine spent a fortnight in slippers that were a size too big because they were the ones I grabbed, and every attempt to walk her anywhere was a shuffle. Proper shoes that fasten, and her own clothes rather than a gown, changed how she moved within about two days of getting home.

Not a treatment. Just the difference between someone dressed like a patient and someone dressed like a person who is about to walk somewhere.

#4Dr Nadia FarhatMedical moderator(Joined Nov 2024 · 54 posts)July 4, 2026, 12:05 pm

What you are describing is real, it has a name, and the fact that nobody named it for you while he was on the ward is the part I would take issue with rather than the fact that it happened.

The short answer to your question is that yes, a week of largely lying in a bed reduces strength and balance in an older person, and that loss is not evenly distributed: it lands hardest on the muscles used to stand up out of a chair, which is precisely what you are now doing twice an hour. It is also not the whole explanation. Anyone acutely unwell enough to need eight days of hospital treatment is losing ground to the illness as well as to the bed, and separating the two matters, because one of them recovers and the other one needs somebody to look at it.

So the useful question is not whether this is normal but whether it is being followed up, and there are three things underneath it worth checking rather than accepting.

The first is whether anybody assessed his mobility before he left and referred him on. What you want to know is whether a physiotherapist saw him, what they recorded he could do, and what was referred into the community. A referral discussed on a ward round is not a referral made, and this is the single most common gap I see: the person is discharged as walking with assistance, and the assistance is you, indefinitely, with no review date.

The second is falls, because a man who could stand up eight days ago and cannot reliably do so now is in a considerably higher risk group than he was in June. NICE guideline NG249, published in April 2025, records that around a third of people aged 65 and over and around half of people aged 80 and over fall at least once a year, and it puts the one year mortality rate after a hip fracture at 31 percent. That is not written to frighten you. It is written because a request for a falls assessment, using those words, is a reasonable thing to make now rather than after the first fall, and a recent hospital stay plus a visible drop in mobility is exactly the history that justifies it.

The third is the medicines. Things are often started, stopped or changed during an admission, and some of the changes affect blood pressure on standing, alertness and balance. I am not going to guess at his, and nothing here is a comment on his treatment, because I have not seen him or his notes. What I will say is that a structured medication review is a named thing you can ask his own prescriber or the pharmacy for after any admission, and it is one of the more productive requests available to a carer.

Two practical notes for the next few weeks. Watch for confusion as well as weakness, because new or fluctuating confusion after an admission is a same day call in its own right rather than tiredness. And be careful of your own back while you are doing all this standing and sitting: two people helping badly is how carers end up injured, and moving someone safely is worth twenty minutes before you develop a technique of your own.

When they go into hospital sets out the three things that happen on wards to older people, this one included, and what to ask about while somebody is still in the bed.

#5ron-at-home(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)July 27, 2026, 6:36 pm

Three and a half weeks on.

Physio did see him in hospital, it turns out, once. There was no community referral. I found that out by ringing and asking the question in the exact form Dr Farhat put it, which felt rude and got me a straight answer in under a minute, which tells you something.

There is a referral now and a waiting list. He is doing chair stands most days, badly, and getting cross about it, which I am choosing to read as encouraging. The medication review is booked for the fourteenth.

What I cannot get past is that all of this would have been in place on discharge day if one person had said the word out loud while he was still in there. Nobody was unkind. It just was not anybody's job.