Thursday, October 29, 2009
Hannah Stanley didn’t plan to get so drunk on her 21st birthday. She planned to have a few shots and a couple beers, and call it a night. Her real party, when she planned to conquer 21 shots, was the following night.
Photo illustration by Francesca Chambers
Too much: 21 shots on your 21st birthday is “the craziest thing anyone would want to do,” says Tama Sawyer, director of KU Med’s Poison Control Center.
But almost everything after her 4 p.m. arrival at the bar is a blur for Stanley, Olathe junior. She knows her roommate drove her home and that she vomited, but she only knows this through stories from friends.
Needless to say, her second party did not occur the following day. Stanley was too hungover. She thought she had avoided all the pitfalls of novice binge drinking, but as it turns out, conventional wisdom is dead wrong about the properties of alcohol.
The worst drink choices for your 21st birthday, when you are still what Tama Sawyer, director of KU Medical Center’s Poison Control Center, calls a “naïve” drinker, are water, carbonated cocktails and diluted shots. Your body does not absorb hard alcohol as easily as other types of beverages.
The average 120-pound female could be lethally drunk after three hours and eight shots, and the average 170-pound male could die after 10, Sawyer says. At 21 shots, the blood alcohol content level for either sex would be in a zone Sawyer labels as “incompatible with life.”
“This has to be the craziest thing anyone would want to do,” she says.
If you still plan to drink 21 shots, make sure you eat a lot of sugary foods, allow yourself to vomit if you need to and above all, do not let yourself pass out, she says. Alcohol makes it more difficult for oxygen to reach our brain, and we naturally breathe less deeply when sleep. The two combined can result in death.
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Comments
Essential life skills: Safer drinking on your 21st
I would think water and diluted shots would help the situation. Whenever I drink, I make sure to drink copious amounts of water before I crash and the next morning I'm usually hangover-free. And wouldn't diluted shots mean that less alcohol is involved?
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