Hospital shifts gear for spring break

PANAMA CITY, Fla. -- Dewey Aiken had stopped in a left-turn lane when his pickup truck was hit head-on. The five Alabama college students in the other pickup were fine. Aiken wound up at Bay Medical Center's emergency room.

"A spring-breaker broke me," said the 57-year-old retired chemist, managing a smile before he was released after treatment for a few bruises.

For six weeks every year, the hospital shifts gears as hundreds of thousands of students flock to nearby Panama City Beach, the nation's leading spring break destination.

The snowbirds and their heart attacks and strokes are gone, replaced by emergencies dominated by alcohol, drugs and just plain carelessness. A very few spring break patients -- usually victims of traffic accidents or balcony falls -- are seriously injured or die.

Parent's nightmare

Two years ago, Frank Guglielmi, of Findlay, Ohio, received a call that is every parent's nightmare. He was vacationing elsewhere in Florida with the rest of his family while 19-year-old son Andrew, a student at Ohio University, had gone to Panama City Beach.

A doctor told Guglielmi his son only had a 50-50 chance of living after slipping and falling from a hotel's third-floor balcony. He died at Bay Medical two weeks later.

"The intensive care unit was a war zone," Guglielmi recalled, full of other young people in comas from drug overdoses and car accidents.

Those and most other spring break patients, however, recover, said Dr. Frederick Epstein, chairman of the hospital's Emergency Medicine Department.

Statistically, there is little difference in the number of patients entering the hospital from one season to the next because the students replace retirees who winter in Florida and return home when spring break begins, Epstein said.

However, the cases themselves change. Students are more prone to drug overdoses, sunburn, sitting too long in hot tubs and broken bones from volleyball and other games.

Brandon J. Schlosser, a 28-year-old truck driver from Versailles, Ill., was the only fatality so far this spring. He fell from a second-floor balcony and suffered potentially fatal head injuries but died of a torn aorta, doctors said. He apparently tried to jump down to talk with women in a parking lot below, but lost his balance and landed on his head, police said.

Alcohol was a factor in the deaths of Schlosser and Andrew Guglielmi, and it figures into many other spring break accidents, even on the dance floor. Nurse Mary Edmands said one student slipped on a spilled drink and broke his ankle.

Ambulance chasing

Drugs, alcohol and crowd mentality all make spring break a dangerous time. A few years ago, Epstein recalled, a group of students took off in an ambulance that had arrived at the beach to pick up a spring break visitor who had nearly drowned.

The thieves hit a parked car with the open driver's door, tearing it off, before police stopped them.

"Our crew had to load this kid and continue lifesaving efforts en route with lights and siren and no door on one side," Epstein said. The patient survived despite the delay.

Dr. Christopher Geertz said the number of spring break visitors going through the emergency room has dropped the past couple of years due largely to a decline in use of the "date rape" drug GHB.

Five years ago, the hospital had four or five patients comatose from the drug at one time, he said.

Drug and alcohol patients usually just sleep it off with friends bedding down in the waiting room until they are discharged. Some are sent away in hospital dresses or scrubs because their clothes were soaked at the beach or they suffered incontinence from alcohol or drugs.

"You almost wish it was ethical to take a photograph or a video of the way they're acting and show it to them when they sober up, send it to their folks," Geertz said. "Most of them aren't too proud of the way they look when they come to."