By Adam Smeltz
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
Centre Daily Times (Pennsylvania)
Copyright 2006 Centre Daily Times
The young woman is barely conscious when the medics find her sitting curbside along East Beaver Avenue.
It’s just before 2 a.m. Sunday. Emergency medical crews at Beaver Stadium have already fielded some 30 to 40 alcohol-related calls and requests — probably more than that — since daybreak Saturday.
But now the booze calls are shifting heavily, and predictably, into the downtown. Medics are girding for a hectic night, thanks to the nighttime Penn State football game against the University of Michigan.
At the sole night game in 2005, drunks kept the medics busy. Forty people landed in Mount Nittany Medical Center that weekend for alcohol overdoses, and dozens more were treated for alcohol-related cuts and scrapes. The Nittany Lions won.
So far, this night has been relatively tame, probably because the Lions lost, medics say.
The woman on East Beaver, however, has turned white. Friends are with her, and someone was concerned enough to summon an ambulance.
The woman doesn’t want to go to the hospital. She won’t tell the responders her name until they call in the police.
Within 15 minutes, she’s bound for Mount Nittany Medical Center. She’s flatulent in the back of a Centre LifeLink ambulance.
She tells her hosts — paramedic Tracy Reagan and emergency medical technician Nichole Garrity — that she’s smarter than them.
She is, she says, working toward a master’s degree. Another smell — alcohol — drifts through the vehicle.
Reagan and Garrity hold back. Later, they congratulate each other for not giving the woman any lip.
“They’ll never realize,” Garrity says, “what you’re doing for them.”
LifeLink, the primary emergency medical service in the Centre Region, staffs five ambulances for this night. It normally runs three or four on football weekends, but it wanted to be ready for the Michigan weekend, Reagan says.
Seven paid staff members and seven volunteers are on duty. While exact call-volume and alcohol-overdose counts aren’t immediately available, it’s clear that this night is seeing light volume for a football weekend.
From 4 p.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Sunday, LifeLink responds to 20 to 25 calls that may be related to alcohol.
Reagan and Garrity answer four calls between 2 and 3:15 a.m.: the drunk woman along East Beaver, a drunk fall victim in the Highlands, a sleepy drunk who passed out in an Atherton Street motel lobby, and a passed-out drunk at the downtown McDonald’s.
All go to the hospital.
Reagan, who ran her first gig with the ambulance service in the early ‘90s, is certain that booze-related calls and the blood-alcohol levels of patients are on a steady climb.
Data at Mount Nittany Medical Center back her up. Penn State students at University Park made 304 alcohol-related visits to the hospital in 2005 — a new record. Their average blood-alcohol level rose to 0.242, three times the threshold for DUI.
Their average age was 20, according to the hospital.
A Penn State-State College partnership has tried to deflate dangerous drinking through educational and public-relations efforts.
But from the ambulance view, the trend is still an upward swing.
On the front lines, Reagan and Garrity know the faces behind the well-known statistics.
The drunks, often called in by police, are frequently vicious and resist treatment. About 75 percent of those treated by Reagan are under 21, she says. Sometimes they mess themselves in her ambulance.
Most frequently, they’re in the downtown, sometimes unconscious on bar bathroom floors. One recent patient would identify his home address only as ".” Reagan told him he was going to ".”
She laughs.
“You get over vomit real quick.”