1. Commander Caty

    Commander Caty Banned

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    Drunken head injuries

    Discussion in 'Research' started by Commander Caty, May 18, 2017.

    What would happen if someone were to fall and slam their head really hard while drunk? Would they be able to get right up afterwards? Would the person being drunk make any difference in the situation? I've never been drunk in my life but I've heard that alcohol makes you bleed more and things of that nature.
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2017
  2. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    How hard we talking? People can be shot in the head and not lose consciousness. Others can take a minor blow to the temple and fall down dead. Not sure what being drunk would have to do with it. You might feel less pain or more pain. What kind of drunk? Big difference between whiskey, beer, and tequila...
     
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  3. Commander Caty

    Commander Caty Banned

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    Like slamming headfirst into a table top after doing an excessive amount of Tequila shots.
     
  4. Homer Potvin

    Homer Potvin A tombstone hand and a graveyard mind Staff Supporter Contributor

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    I've gotten up from that and not gotten up from that before. Try it and see what happens :)
     
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  5. newjerseyrunner

    newjerseyrunner Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Depends more on how drunk. If I'm just having a few beers over the length of a football game, I'm drunk, but not enough to make it hard to stand up.
     
  6. BogLady

    BogLady Active Member

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    Also need to take into account the age and health of the person hitting their head. Actually knew an older man who fell down drunk in his own driveway, hit his head on a concrete curb and his wife found him the next morning still out cold in the driveway. Called the ambulance, spent several days in intensive care. We weren't sure he was going to make it because of the bleeding/swelling on the brain.
     
  7. Commander Caty

    Commander Caty Banned

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    He's like borderline alcohol poisoning level drunk. Which would probably make it hard to stand up as it is. I'm just kind of wondering if it would be realistic for him to get right back up without being knocked out.
     
  8. Minty Talons

    Minty Talons Member

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    Yeah he'd be able to get back up, being drunk wouldn't increase his chances of getting knocked out at all.
    He would be incredibly confused though.
     
  9. Lemie

    Lemie Contributor Contributor

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    I can only speak for myself, but when I get really drunk everything spins around. Laying on the ground and the entire world is a Merry-go-round. So if I hit my head while being almost black out drunk I would probably stay down for quite some time. Not because I couldn't stand (even though I'd probably be even more dizzy than before the hit) but because I'd feel sorry for myself and GOD can't shit just stop spinning?

    I'd probably be puking, as well. Both because he's almost alcohol poisoned, as you stated, and also because he probably got a concussion.

    All this said - he might get through this without barley noticing. A friend of my brother once partied barefoot and didn't notice until later that her feet were slashed by broken bottles. Pain can work funny when you're drunk, but I think as a general rule that you feel LESS. That doesn't mean the injury isn't there, so if nothing else he'll have the hang over of his life! Yay.
     
  10. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    Once when my brother was fall-down drunk, he was horsing around and slipped, hit the corner of his eye, which bleeds like hell, so it looked real nasty, but he was wasted enough to not really notice. Just got up, we went home (I was drunk af myself, so somehow I was fine with him going like 'nah, I'm ok'), and patched it up.

    So basically, if you want an injury that won't slow down your character that could happen. He still has a nice scar as a souvenir, so there's that too.
     
  11. amerrigan

    amerrigan Active Member

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    There were studies showing that a drunk person in a car accident was more likely to walk away with less injuries due to their body going limp and not bracing for impact, which ultimately was the reason for shattered limbs in car accidents. Panic, place hands on dash board, arms crumple. The grim implication is that drunk drivers survive while the people they crash into don't.

    But for what you are asking - if you have a situation in which the body would have been tense when sober it would have been hurt more, then you can realistically make the floppy head of the drunk be hurt less. Easiest would be to place this damage in the neck region. But you could go as far as allowing the drunk head to bounce off the surface, rather than the sober head hitting it hard on the end of a neck that has instinctively stiffened because they were conscious of the coming collision.
     
  12. Dr.Meow

    Dr.Meow Contributor Contributor

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    As one experienced in intoxication, I will say this depends on the person more than anything else. In the past I could be suffering alcohol poisoning and still have no problem standing. Today I try to avoid getting too drunk because it doesn't sit as well with me, I can't take the same abuse I used to...or rather, I don't want to. That being said, if I was in that state, I probably wouldn't notice a bump to the head unless it was a pretty heavy force. Drunks survive car crashes when sober people don't, it's a somewhat common thing, but mostly because the drunk person is loosened up and turns into a rag doll which lessens some of the impact. A sad fact of reality. Don't drive drunk.

    Bumping my head on a table would be unlikely no matter what level of intoxication I'm at though, I hardly remember myself stumbling around excessively when drunk. I've had alcohol poisoning before, and I actually still remember all the details of that night, and I've never had a blackout before in my life. Everyone is different though, I know some people that have a six pack of bud light and they've gone too far...but that amount of alcohol would hardly do much for someone else. Consider the person rather than the amount of intoxication.
     
  13. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    "One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor!" :supergrin:

    While I have never had tequila, I have gotten
    blackout drunk twice on Wild Turkey 101 and
    coke. Never slammed my head into anything.
    (Moral is I don't drink Whiskey any more.)

    The is a difference between being excessively
    drunk, and blackout. While being pretty drunk
    will dull your senses to some varying degree
    (depends on the person), but you can still feel
    pain. The latter, well probably won't remember
    anything and bounce back up from it (or pass
    out) from knocking the table with your noggin.

    It is a common knowledge fact that alcohol is
    a blood thinner, and it will make you bleed more
    as a result. Still this is dependent on the person
    and how much/often they get drunk as to whether
    or not you would bleed more before clotting occurs.

    So get a lime, salt, a shot glass, and a bottle of Tequila.
    Warning: Tequila has been known to make some persons
    mean, for some reason. :p

    Venture forth good Sirette, and get bombed ( or whatever slang you like). :D
     
  14. matwoolf

    matwoolf Banned Contributor

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    If my drunk pal fell over and banged his head - and then began throwing up I'd have concerns he might be concussed. If he became feverish, hot, with fluid emerging at his ears and nose I'd have (even) great(er) concerns he might have suffered a compression injury, a bleed on the brain. Either ways I'd turn all citizen and get him to hospital immediately.
     
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  15. Lemie

    Lemie Contributor Contributor

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    "We need to calm down a bit... we need... TEQUILA!"

    I just remembered why I don't go out drinking with my boyfriend anymore. We don't have the same definition of "calm"... ;)
     
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  16. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Ive got a scar on the underneath of my chin where i fell over and tore it open while running fromone pub to another on a pub crawl many years ago - it bled like buggery but in my intoxicated state i didnt realise how bad it was so i just stuck a big elastoplast over it and went on drinking - somehow i pulled that night as well - come the morning i could barely open my mouth and had a massive blood clotted mess over the plaster

    The girl concerned drove me to A&E (the british equivalent of the ER) where the doctors went nuts because it was considerably harder to suture than it would have been if i'd come straight in

    that is if hes physically capable of getting up being drunk makes him less likely to take his injury seriously
     
  17. GingerCoffee

    GingerCoffee Web Surfer Girl Contributor

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    That may be a myth.

    Drunks More Likely to Survive Injuries, Study Suggests
    The alcohol is more likely doing something to the circulatory system.



    Falling against something like a table, an intoxicated person would hit harder. Unlike a car accident where the person acts like a projectile, moving forward with the momentum of the vehicle until you hit something, falling with just the force of gravity, having reflexes protects you. Better to block your fall with your hands/arms for example.
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2017
  18. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Never had it. TBH, I would forego or steeply reduce my drinking considerably if I was partnered. (Lonely man problems) :p
     
  19. Lemie

    Lemie Contributor Contributor

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    I was a student once. Students tends to get shit faced. My tequila days are almost over, though. There is a certain special one at a restaurant in town, I've promised to sample that. After that, though, I'm out of the race for good!
     
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  20. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Its all good. Not putting anything out there.
    Take it easy. :)
     
  21. Michael Pless

    Michael Pless Senior Member

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    I was initially thinking of something harder, like a concrete footpath. With a table, I can't stop imagining the forehead hitting first, which might split the skin and cause a lot of bleeding but not a great deal of damage - soccer players use their foreheads all the time with little evidence of the impact from the ball.

    A lot of discussion has centred on the alcohol causing more bleeding, but my quick research indicates that platelet formation can be hampered in long-term drinkers, and I don't believe that if this was a one-time thing, that the ingestion of alcohol would significantly impact blood clotting. Head wounds tend to bleed a lot anyway. Bear in mind that to get falling-down drunk, the alcohol level will vary between 0.1 and 0.5% w/v, which is not a significant amount in the blood - at the higher level unconsciousness is impending, if not there already; my tolerance to alcohol is very weak so I'd be at the lower end of the scale. When I was working the blood alcohol section of the forensic lab, we'd get infrequent blood samples from people pulled unconscious from car wreckage and they'd be above 0.4, and the popular consensus at the time was that they'd consumed a huge amount, gone for a drive and passed-out at the wheel, and then their body has absorbed the alcohol into their bloodstream.
     
  22. Shadowfax

    Shadowfax Contributor Contributor

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    Write what you know?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Astle

    Jeffrey "Jeff" Astle ... choked to death at his daughter's home aged 59.[3] The cause of death was a degenerative brain disease that had first become apparent as much as five years earlier. He had been described as an exceptional header of the ball, and the coroner found that the repeated minor traumas had been the cause of his death, as the leather footballs used in Astle's playing days were considerably heavier than the plastic ones used later, especially when wet. This was not the first case of a footballer's illness or death (particularly in the form of Alzheimer's or dementia type symptoms) being connected to heading old-fashioned footballs, another example being the former Tottenham Hotspur captain Danny Blanchflower who died of Alzheimer's disease in December 1993.

     
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  23. Thundair

    Thundair Contributor Contributor

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    The aftermath would be in a slurred statement, "What happened?" That leaves it open to the reader if the character was dazed or knocked out.
     
  24. Michael Pless

    Michael Pless Senior Member

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    Fascinating, and I'm grateful for the quote. The wiki article refers to those whose career involved long-term collisions between head and ball. And in retrospect, it makes sense because there is impact with the ball and I expect there will be recoil of the head with associated brain movement.

    However, if talking about a single instance or possibly a few instances (of head hitting table), I think my statement still stands.
     
  25. Orcalot

    Orcalot Member

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    Ah the sweet memories of the completely shit-faced days of youth!
    As someone who has fallen A LOT from dunkenness back in the good ol' days of my 20's, I can tell you that the main difference between sober falls and drunken falls is the awareness of pain. Alcohol is a painkiller, and the more you drink, the more effective it is. I've fallen back from a standing position and smacked my head off concrete and just lay there laughing, because when you've had a bottle of wine and 20 million tequilla shots everything is hilarious! I've also fallen and actually broken my arm, but I was so out of it I wasn't even aware it was broken 'til the next morning when the pain drove me to the hospital. It will all depend on the amount you've had and the severity of the bang to the head, but even small amounts of booze will have an impact on what happens.

    Don't know about you guys, but if the responses to this post are anything to go by, I'd say we have the makings of one hell-of-a-god-damn party here in our little corner of the forum!! Lemon slice anyone??? Cheers!!! :twisted:
     

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