Woman shares horrifying photo of binge-drinking coma to warn of alcohol dangers
'Doctors thought I was completely brain dead,' Hanna Lottritz says
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A student has shared a horrifying photo of her in hospital after a night of binge drinking ended in a coma, in an effort to warn others about the dangers of alcohol.
Hanna Lottritz, a 21-year-old journalism student at the University of Nevada, wrote a detailed blog about what happened to her when she drank five times the legal alcohol limit for a person driving and ended up in a coma.
She writes on her blog she writes: “I didn’t realise the importance of drinking responsibly until I was waking up from a coma.”
Ms Lottritz had been at a music festival where she had only two beers.
“Many of the people I was with had been drinking throughout the day and were already feeling good.
“My problems started after the concert. I ended up at a campsite where I found some of my other friends.
“This group [of friends] was mostly guys who (for some reason) I promised I could out-drink.”
Ms Lottritz said she and her friend competed for how long they could drink from a bottle of whisky without stopping.
Afterwards, she said she told her friends she was fine, before collapsing and blacking out.
She woke up from a coma, with a tube down her throat to enable her to breath and her hands restrained, preventing her from removing it.
She was told doctors had thought she was brain dead as she was completely unresponsive, unable to respond to verbal or painful stimuli.
She suffered acute respiratory failure and acute alcohol intoxication, with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.41 - a reading five times the legal limit allowed for driving.
The breathing pipe was removed from her throat several hours after waking.
She was asked if she had tried to kill herself from drinking alcohol, a question she said made her realise “the seriousness of being irresponsible with alcohol".
Ms Lottritz said the event had changed her approach to alcohol forever.
Instead of going out and drinking shots on her 21st birthday, she said she would be celebrating the recent milestone with dinner and “maybe a glass of wine.”
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