My late wife took Decadron as part of her chemotherapy cocktail. It lasts a bit more than 24 hours, and her moods changed like clockwork.
First came energy, then brain fog started creeping in. There was a 3 hour window of hair trigger crabby, while the brain fog arrived in full force. At which point this normally brilliant woman (math Phd from MIT, MPH, Erdös #2, 80+ papers, approaching 10K cites) couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to watch the most banal TV we could find, a pick-a-house HGTV show. When it was close to wearing off, and the fog was clearing, there was a luckily short but profound bit of depression.
The hospital had a writeup on what could happen. It included the official possible effects, as well as the anecdotal ones. As usual there was the typical ban on operating heavy machinery, but the doctor had added their own, no operating any heavy decisions. It was fine to decide its time for lunch, but don’t work on your will, you might discover you left your fortune to a cat, and it wasn’t even your cat.
The cabinet should have said, let mike take care of stuff until the steroids wear off. One ER doctor after reading about his little joyride, and his unwillingness to protect others, said if one of her patients tryied that, she would have called in a psych consult and pitched a 72 hour involuntary hold as a danger to others.
