By 
It was summer break — the weekend of Nevada's largest country music festival. That Saturday, July 25, started innocently enough for Hanna Lottritz, a student at University of Nevada, Reno. The 20 year old met up with friends for a game of human foosball. Later, the group got dinner together before heading to the Night in the Country music festival in a nearby town.
They went to the Joe Nichols and Jake Owen concert, where Hanna had a couple of beers. By the end of the show, she had a little bit of a buzz but wasn't feeling as "good" as some of her friends who had started drinking earlier in the day.
She wandered off from her friends and went to a campsite where another group of pals, mostly guys, were partying. Hannah, who says she's a naturally competitive person, began throwing back whiskey like one of the boys.
"I promised I could outdrink [them]," Hannah recalls. Around 11:30 p.m., one of my guy friends and I were seeing who could take the longest chug from a bottle of Black Velvet Whiskey."
Everything after that is a blur, fragments of scenes Hanna has culled together from friends. She has no memory of the rest of the night. She doesn't remember collapsing after downing a Solo cup full of whiskey, or being carried to the festival's medical tent, or being flown to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno.
When she arrived to the hospital, Hanna had a blood alcohol concentration five times the legal limit, and she was suffering from acute respiratory failure. Doctors thought she was brain dead.
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Hanna recently celebrated her 21st birthday. Not with cocktails or shots, but by opening up about her near-death experience with alcohol in a poignant blog post. Fully recovered now, she feels fortunate, but knows "there are others who won't be as lucky."
That fateful night, Hanna slipped into a coma. When she awoke, 24 hours later, a painful tube snaked down her throat; her hands were restrained so she couldn't remove it. Her wrists were black and blue from being poked with needles for blood tests. "The first thing I remember is my mom holding my hand, telling me I was going to be okay," Hanna writes.
The tube made it impossible for her to talk. She had to pass a respiratory test before it could be removed, and she failed the first one, extending her extreme discomfort by several hours.
"Doctors and nurses told me how lucky I was to be alive," Hanna writes. "They asked me if I was trying to kill myself by drinking so much. 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."
Her account of the ordeal has gone viral, with fathers saying they'll share her words with their teenage daughters, and peers identifying with Hanna's behavior, expressing their own gratitude for being alive today, despite similar mistakes. Countless blogs and media outlets have covered her story, saying it's too important—"too close to home" for some—not to share.
"I could have easily been taken advantage of when I passed out," Hanna reflects in her essay. She could have been left to "sleep it off," a phrase Hanna's heard too many times—and exactly what happened to 17-year-old Shelby Allen, who died after doing 15 shots of vodka. "I'm alive today because my friends got me help."
[via USA Today]
