Student's essay on near-death binge drinking goes viral

Doctors didn’t expect University of Nevada, Reno student Hanna Lottritz to live through the night when she arrived at Renown Regional Medical Center.

With a blood alcohol concentration five times over the legal limit, the then 20-year-old college student was unresponsive when she arrived at the hospital via care flight the morning of July 26, 2015

Lottritz, a journalism major at UNR, shared her experience on her blog.

What she thought would be a post that would resonate with some has gone viral and received more than 350,000 page views over the last few days. It has been reprinted by The Huffington Post and shared in other languages around the world.

“I’m getting mixed reactions but most of it supportive,” said Lottritz, who braved telling her story in the hopes that it could prevent even one person from going through what she and her family did when doctors expected her to die.

She wrote the post in honor of her 21st birthday last week writing, “ I didn’t realize the importance of drinking responsibly until I was waking up from a coma.”

She said she thinks her story is powerful because it’s rare to hear this perspective. “Most of the time it’s from doctors or someone talking about someone they knew.”

Lottritz, who was with friends at the Night in the Country Music Festival in Yerington, Nevada, started drinking after dinner.

She writes in her blog post that she felt a behind because friends were drinking during the day, so she started drinking Black Velvet Whiskey.  Friends later told her she drank a cup full of whiskey after chugging from the bottle.

She collapsed and friends carried her to the medical tent. She wasn’t breathing.

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She said she was lucky that she had friends who got help.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase, ‘Let them sleep it off, they’ll be fine in the morning,’” she wrote.

Lottritz said the worst part was the impact on her family.

“The police were at my home at 1 a.m. waking up my parents,” she said.

In her blog, she writes that doctors thought she was brain dead because she was unresponsive and not responding to verbal or painful stimuli.

“From my hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit, my eyes were opened to the seriousness of being irresponsible with alcohol,” Lottritz wrote.

Lottritz graduated from McQueen High School in 2013. She will graduate from UNR next December and hopes to work in broadcast sports journalism.

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