Hannah Lottritz is a 21-year-old journalism student at the University of Nevada, Reno.
She, like many other students, enjoys nights out and drinking.
However, the student took to her blog recently to share a harrowing experience that is quite common amongst students.
Sharing the below image Hannah writes:
“Today is my 21st birthday, a day I have been looking forward to for quite some time now. Due to an event that happened about six months ago, I will not be taking birthday shots and getting wasted tonight. Instead, I plan on having dinner and maybe a glass of wine with my closest friends and family.
I am writing this because I didn’t realize the importance of drinking responsibly until I was waking up from a coma, and I don’t want anyone to go through what my family and I went through”.
Hannah progresses to share the story of an incident that occurred at a music festival. The student writes that she had entered into a drinking challenge with a friend. Hannah says that she had two beers at the concert and that she felt she was lagging behind the group and wanted to “catch-up”.
She writes:
“Many of the people I was with had been drinking throughout the day and were already feeling good. I hadn’t started drinking until a little after dinner and I felt a little behind. My problems started after the concert. I was beginning to feel a little bit of a buzz and drifted off from the people I went to the concert with.
“I ended up at a campsite where I found some of my other friends. I am a competitive person by nature and this group was mostly guys who (for some reason) I promised I could outdrink. Around 11:30 pm, one of my guy friends and I were seeing who could take the longest chug from a bottle of “Black Velvet Whiskey.”
In the aftermath, Hannah felt fine, but some minutes later she collapsed.
“I wasn’t breathing. My friends picked me up and started carrying me to the medical tent. From there I was intubated and taken to Renown hospital in Reno, Nevada via care flight. Meanwhile, the police showed up at my house to tell my parents to meet me at the hospital” she said.
Hannah fell into a deep coma, not waking until a full 24hours after she’d entered the hospital.
“I was in critical condition, suffering from acute respiratory failure and acute alcohol intoxication. My blood alcohol concentration was .41 when I arrived at the hospital, five times over the legal limit. The doctors thought I was brain dead because I was completely unresponsive. My pupils were sluggishly reactive, I had no corneal reflex and I wasn’t responding to verbal or painful stimuli” she writes.
Bruises on Hannah’s wrists from where blood was withdrawn.
The effects of the alcohol were so severe on Hannah’s body that medics asked if she had tried to kill herself.
“This question hit me the hardest. From my hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit, my eyes were opened to the seriousness of being irresponsible with alcohol. The next day when I was discharged from the hospital, I realized that the way I looked at alcohol would be changed forever” she said.
Hannah hopes that people will spread the message of her post and be more considerate when consuming alcohol.
At midnight I’ll post something very serious and important to me. I’m hoping you will all take the time to read it and share w/ loved ones.
— Hanna Lottritz (@hlottritz) January 6, 2016
