Worried about my mom

If you remember, my mom (age 78) broke her hip at the end of October, she had the surgery, and she did great in rehab in the nursing home.

Unfortunately, now that she's back in her assisted living apartment, she seems to be having quite a bit more confusion than she did prior to her fall. One day she took the top and pump assembly out of her "Softsoap" bottle, apparently not knowing what it was for, and somehow got the entire assembly shoved into her toothpaste tube for a cap. She then brought the cap of her toothpaste to me along with the soap bottle and told me "I can't get the cap to go on."

Another day, she was putting away laundry, and she told me, "I just can't tell which ones are the big towels and which ones are the small ones right now."

And the pills. For two years she has lived in the assisted living apartment. For all of those two years, I have set her pills up in a set of three "day of the week" containers, one for morning, one for noon, and one for night time. Each container is a different color. She has almost never had any trouble taking them. And now since she has been back home, she can't do it. She wants to take all three sets at once, she wants to take the nighttime pills in the morning...we had to up her care level at the assisted living, because she now needs someone to coach her with the pill-taking.

This is new. And unfortunately pretty scary. I've known for a long time that hip fractures are really really bad news for elderly people, so it should really come as no surprise, but it still does. It seemed like things were going so well. She doesn't even use a walker now, except on long walks!

My brother spent a couple of days with her this past week and told me that she got up at 5:30am (early for her) and got extremely agitated because she couldn't figure out how to dress herself. Even in the nursing home, in the rehab, she was putting on sweaters and stuff....

So earlier this week I brought her to the doctor, he did blood work and a chest X ray and said she has a "possible" urinary tract infection, and a "possible" pneumonia. So she's been taking antibiotics, but they don't seem to be helping the confusion much.

We think she has had a type of dementia called "Posterior Cortical Atrophy" for about 6 or 7 years now, and it's rather uncommon, so I'm always unable to find out much information as to what to expect. I'm scared that there's something medical that I'm overlooking, this change was so sudden....and I'm scared that there's nothing at all to be done. I hate this. Another person I love with cognitive issues, and I didn't sign up for it.