Brief Answer:
cannot directly say

Detailed Answer:
without examining her there are a lot of general bits of information, however, that you may find helpful.

Frankly, under 5 to 6 pills a day are considered below the level that the FDA has guidelines for. And there have been articles this month on the dangers of aspirin like drugs including over the counter naproxen and ibuprofen IN THIS TYPE OF PERSON that can be fatal. So... saftety wise, LOW doses of oxycodone are fine. Tylenol is dangerous in overdose, but then, so is water. the same way that 5x the normal daily dose of water in one big glass can kill you (seizures) 5 times one extra strength tylenol in one handful can also be fatal. That would be about 10 to 20 of the percocet 5. Bad. Don't do that.

Then, the particular type of pain and the underlying illness matters. in "hospice" it tends to be bad disease and very bad pain and there is not necessarily a limit on the amount of narcotic to take (even though it might be fatal).

So... a mild amount of narcotic responsibly used in a very bad disease that is working is not that bad


BUT, there is the change in mentation. that is an entirely different case. IN someone who is sick and elderly, narcotics can make someone disoreiented. This is bad. Lowering the dose for a small amount of time would show if that is the case. HOWEVER, I have more people with this from other causes in a given week than I do lifetime from narcotics (about 3 total with change in mentation from narcotics; many many from infection, pneumonia, UTI, thyroid, depression, cancer, malnutrition, lung / kidney/heart/ etc etc.) which I couldn't say what is the cause without being there.

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Brief Answer:
Thank you for the opportunity

Detailed Answer:
to not have a good answer.
1) Oh, right, pain can cause change in mental status either directly or though not eating not drinking fluids (dehydration) or lack of sleep.
2) it is usual for people to (WRONGLY) still keep taking the narcotic/antibiotic/asthma medicine even when the condition was temporary and gone. Half of those we call "asthmatic" don't get/need any treatment in a given year. I see hundreds of people who either have nothing or have cigarettes, they get a cold, wheeze, get asthma medicine (good) and a label (not so much). So, stopping the narcotic if it is under 30 mg a day WON"T cause withdrawal (ok, I have someone in whom it does, they are very very small).


The narcotics are a very very common cause of change in mental status in the elderly even at low and reasonable and prescribed doses.


3) When an answer is hard, and if you've had a good college education, you can find that it has a basis in a classically insolvable problem. In this case it is the "other minds" problem. You don't have telepathy. You do not know what is in other minds. Therefore you cannot know if someone really has pain.

Here's how that isn't an issue in actual science like neurology but is a problem in crap like psychology---> we don't look for positives like finding thoughs, emotions, or neural wiring diagrams... we look for NEGATIVES. So, all of neurology has been worked out in trauma and stroke. If someone cannot do something, then we see what is lacking/missing/broke and then figure those must be related. In pain, we have someone move everything on command, and if they can't move it, we figure that's pain.

answer:
So, if movements are not even on the right and the left, yeah, that's how you tell. (yeah, but if I just said that, you wouldn't get that this answers an almost impossible question, and you'd want a better answer than this when it is truly impossible to give a better answer than this for the reasons outlined).

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