I am a caregiver who has been employed by the same family for nearly 25 years. I am a former Executive Assistant whose job morphed into a personal assistant/caregiver over the years after my boss retired - so I have no medical experience. My bosses wife, 89 years old, has Congestive Heart Failure and is followed by an excellent heart doctor. The patient weighs only 110 and is 5' 2" tall. Her medical history over the past few years... she has had 6 falls and broke her arm in one of the falls last year which required surgery to repair. She has macular degeneration (advanced) and had a radical mastectomy in 1983 with no reoccurence of malignant cancer since that time.

My question is that over the past week, the patient can barely stay awake for a couple of hours at a time and falls asleep sitting up whereever she happens to be. My boss and I are concerned about this, as it seems to be just within the past week that no matter where she is, she falls asleep. The patient's cardiologist recently accelerated her diuretics and told her to take a second one and then a third one when she has increased fluid build-up. Could the increased diuretics cause her to be sleeping so much? Is the need to sleep so much a sign of "end-stage" CHF? Thank you.