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Dangerously drunk

Agencies, Mercy see rise in intoxicated patients in intensive care

Mercy Regional Medical Center and other local health agencies are reporting a troubling trend in treating patients who come to their facilities excessively drunk.

“As a community, more people are using and misusing alcohol,” said Kip Boyd, medical director at Mercy.

Over the last five years, Boyd said, Mercy has seen more people being admitted to and treated in the intensive care unit for alcohol-related illnesses.

The lack of residential and outpatient care programs for people struggling with substance abuse in the region forces intoxicated patients to frequent the Detox center at Axis Health Systems and the intensive care unit at Mercy, Boyd said.

Anecdotally, Boyd said the hospital is treating more younger patients with severe alcohol illnesses.

“The kinds of things we used to see in patients in their 40s and 50s, we are now seeing in their 20s and 30s,” Boyd said.

But the problem isn’t limited to a single demographic. There are college students who come in who have been binge drinking, and there are also patients treated for chronic drinking problems, Boyd said.

“It’s across-the-board usage, not just poor people and college students,” he said. “It can be middle-aged professionals.”

The severity also means more patients will often need mechanical ventilator support, Boyd said, particularly those who are experiencing severe alcohol withdrawal symptoms.

Mercy has more than 10 ventilators that are allocated to patients in the hospital. Those ventilators are often used for the patients in the ICU with alcohol-related illnesses, said Linda Young, Mercy’s director of Critical Care and Cardiovascular Services.

“You have to manage the patient’s symptoms; it takes a lot of specific care,” she said. “These patients require a lot of the hospital’s resources.”

Normalizing drinking

Alcohol is easily available and is “normalized” in the community, said Pam Wise Romero, chief operations officer at Axis Health Systems, which operates the Detox center.

“Drinking is part of the culture and involved with how people celebrate and what they do,” Romero said. “It is our largest substance problem.”

Cpl. Glenn Edwards with the Durango Police Department said calls reporting people who are intoxicated have remained constant over the past five years.

Durango police will respond to each call and determine how intoxicated the person is and whether he or she has traumatic injuries that requires medical assistance, Edwards said.

“It’s a daily occurrence that we get a call from someone whose primary problem or only problem is that they are intoxicated and unable to function on some level,” said Shane Baird, Emergency Medical Services captain for Durango Fire Protection District.

If the person is drunk to a point where he or she cannot walk or talk or has an injury, the officer will contact Durango Fire Protection District’s Emergency Medical System to provide medical assistance.

A lot of times, the patient will have a traumatic injury from falling and will need additional medical assistance. In these situations, the person is taken to the emergency room and monitored in the ICU until he or she is sober, Baird said.

If the person isn’t so drunk that he or she needs medical assistance, Durango police will take the person to the Detox center, Edwards said.

“It is basic care for somebody. We take the best possible advantage we can to connect patients to treatment,” said Bern Heath, CEO of Axis Health Systems. “It is a humane way to work with folks suffering from episodic or chronic substance use.”

The Detox center, which provides care for about 1,200 patients annually, has six beds for men, four for women and two for the occasional adolescent patient, Heath said.

There are late-stage chronic alcoholics who will visit the facility on a regular basis. There are also patients who go through Detox and are never seen in the facility again.

“Anecdotally, we are seeing more women than we have in the past come into the Detox center,” he said.

Detox is only a temporary help. Outside the Detox center, people who struggle with alcohol abuse can seek help from Axis Health Systems’ outpatient program or a recovery program at Southern Ute Peaceful Spirit in Ignacio.

Southern Ute Peaceful Spirit provides a residential recovery program and an outpatient program for people struggling with addiction in La Plata County. The facility treats about 56 residential patients and 120 outpatients per year, said Dennis Dahlke, Peaceful Spirit program director.

“There is a real shortage of residential programs throughout the country,” Dahlke said. “Peaceful Spirit has evolved over the years to remain relevant to the Native American community, but also to the greater community in providing residential treatment.”

Health-care workers say binge drinking contributes to the problem.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines binge-drinking as consuming four or more drinks during a single occasion, for women; and for men, consuming five or more drinks during a single occasion. Heavy drinking is defined as consuming eight or more drinks per week, for women, and 15 or more drinks per week for men.

In the United States, more than 38 million adults, or 1 in 6 people, binge drink, according to the CDC.

“The community embraces substance use,” Romero said. “This is really a significant problem.”

tferraro@durangoherald.com

Alcohol-related illnesses

Withdrawal from alcohol can cause tremors and agitation in its milder forms, and in more severe cases, the patient can become delirious, combative and have seizures.

In addition to these severe withdrawal symptoms, several illnesses are caused by chronic alcohol use, including cirrhosis of the liver, which is when the liver becomes scarred; ascites, the accumulation of fluid in the abdominal cavity; esophageal varices, dilation of large veins at the base of the esophagus that can rupture and bleed; and stomach ulcers, said Kip Boyd, medical director at Mercy Regional Medical Center.

Alcohol, in large quantities, can also damage bone marrow, which will reduce the body’s ability to clot blood normally, Boyd said.



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