Well, my oldest niece is lucky to be alive

[thewayne]

She's 17 and will be a senior in the Fall. She's an A student, extremely smart, weighs about 100 lbs and has, according to her and as far as my sister knows, never drank. She went to a party to watch the last Sun's game and didn't call back when my sister sent her a text message and left a voice message (sister had been having a bad feeling about alcohol poisoning for three weeks). At 15 minutes to midnight or so, they got a call from another girl on my niece's cell that the niece is in the ER. No further information is provided, and subsequent calls to the cell are unanswered.

They get to the ER and find out she has alcohol poisoning. Her BAC was slightly over 0.24.

She went to a party and remembers having one drink, then she remembers nothing until she woke up in the ER. She didn't know where she was, but she figured it out quickly enough as she'd been cut out of her clothes and had a catheter inserted. I'm fairly confident that the drink was drugged. Without going into a ridiculous amount of story, police broke into the house that the party was at and subdued the kid who wouldn't let them in, and found my niece unconscious, on the floor, in a pool of her own vomit.

At the hospital, the doctor told my sister that there was nothing further that they could do, and either she would recover or she would die. My sister was not happy at the doctor's casual demeanor. They'd strung up some IV lines and given her some potassium, I'm guessing that her electrolytes were probably seriously out of whack. The doctor said that her BAC would only go down about 0.03 per hour, so they were in for a long night.


Well, she survived. This was on a Friday night, she went home from the hospital Saturday and basically was a vegetable for the weekend. She had finals on Monday and did OK, pulled B's where she is normally an A student. My sister and her hubby locked down the rules somewhat tighter and forbade parties for her, especially with the kids who were directly involved in this particular party.

Here's the kicker: the kid who was hosting the party? (his parents were out of town) My niece has known him since the 4th grade.

The boys involved actually had the guys to go to my sister's house and apologize. I would probably have been polishing my shotgun.


She's fully recovered, but I'll bet it'll be a long time before she drinks alcohol again.

Comments

[silveradept]

Good that your niece survived the scare. If there was anything more than drinking involved in this occasion, though, there needs to be some head-cracking. (If all there was was a lot of drinking involved, then we just need to smash some heads together to impart useful knowledge in this particular case.) I agree that I think your niece won't be drinking for a while, but I'd also want to find out just what happened there, in case it needs to be drilled into some people's heads that they don't do that kind of thing.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I don't think anything will be discovered further. From what my sister said, unless she had less than complete information (which wouldn't surprise me), the police weren't investigating this as a criminal assault.