<p>Just wanted to add - give credit to the OP for asking the Q in the first place, especially given her background history on the subject of alcoholism. She wouldn’t be here asking if she was sure that her D had made the right judgment.</p>
<p>I’ve never understood the allure behind drunkenness. I find it immature and disturbing. A glass or two of something with a meal or at a social event is one thing, but to pass out drunk in the floor or stumble around not knowing where you are going or what you are doing is another. I know some people do it because they think it helps them with stress. Someone care to explain?</p>
<p>Write, to quote:</p>
<p>(quote) text goes here (/quote)</p>
<p>replace the ( and ) with [ and ].</p>
<p>Thank you, bluealien01!</p>
<p>
Where’d you see that, Roshke??</p>
<p>^^^ Post 26.</p>
<p>Maybe I missed something, but it bothers me a great deal that the RA was not brought into this and, by extension, the school. If I reach way back in my memory to college, if I had believed my roommate was in trouble, I would have contacted the RA who was older and trained to deal with such things, in addition to trying to support my roommate. The idea that a bunch of freshmen were left to figure out what to do and that none of them thought to go to the RA or some other support system in the college, troubles me. What if next time the situation is worse and it’s more than a few hours in the hospital? How will those kids feel that they didn’t go to the RA? I don’t really understand why the ER would not contact the school – I guess that’s HIPPA – but something seems off here in terms of the safety net that should be in place for a kid who was drinking enough to warrant a trip to the ER. Maybe I just missed something reading the posts, but it seems to me that these kids should know exactly who to go to and what to do when something like this happens in terms of a safety net in their housing situation.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if I have ll the answers to all the questions but I’ll try. First- there was no emergency initially- RM was stumbling and loud and could not go to the party (not vomiting and unconscious). Another girl was not all that interested in the party and said she’d take RM back to the dorm. Nobody had any idea what was to transpire over the next 2 hours.<br>
Nobody from the dorm called any of the girls at the party to tell them hat was going on.
The text message came after the fact. Again, by that time RM was in the ER being cared for. The girls (pleural) at the party decided to stay based of the “what can we do about it now” theory. (selfish?- quite possibly). Yes, these girls are freshman.</p>
<p>Am I “appalled” by my D? Absolutely not. It’s not like My D stepped over a bleeding girl in the street or some of the other analogies I’ve read here. Somebody else said “I’ll take care of it” and she was more than happy to let her do so. When things got bad, the people who said they’d take care of it were upset/frightened that they were dealing with the emergency. No one expected that. And for the record on 2 occasions my D has come to the rescue of one of these girls due to excessive drinking. (she actually took a bus by herself to go get one of these girls from a party and has left a football game to hold this same girls head out of the toilet). At this point the entire episode has blown over. RM has apologized to all involved and girls and guys who came down on D have apologized to my D. Everyone is happy. The drama boggles the mind. As someone posted here- next week it will be someone else’s turn. I do pray that this was a wake up call for these girls and the “pre gaming” stuff will be curtailed.</p>
<p>Regarding the RA’s. No RA was on call on their floor. I’m sure someone was in the building but I’m not sure if they involved him/her.<br>
I don’t know how RM was treated at the hospital- but she was deemed fit to leave and was home by 5am (there was the time change though so she may have been in the ER for 5 hours). </p>
<p>As an aside- I was speaking about this to a colleague today and the opposite reaction happened to her son last year. Her son came home to find the RM in distress and called the ambulance. He caught all kinds of grief for being a “narc”! Crazy!</p>
<p>Thanks for your input- as I said I have a skewed view of alcohol abuse as a result of living w/ the nightmare.</p>
<p>mimk6 - that’s exactly what I was thinking. Where was the RA? </p>
<p>Here’s the deal… last night I took D2 and two of her school friends out to dinner (they’re all studying abroad in London). One of the friends is an RA, so I posed this situation to them. The RA told me that whenever someone ‘helps’ another student who has overdrank, even if the helper is underage and has been drinking, they receive amnesty. The RA also said that if she’s been drinking even just a little and is called to help someone in this situation, then she will call for a backup RA. I guess I’m wondering if the girls who are blaming the daughter here are mad at themselves for not having called the RA and putting themselves in the predicament of having to miss out on their Halloween fun, too. Really, this should have all started and stopped with a call to the RA. They are trained to deal with this and more qualified to handle it than any of the other freshman girls, roommates or friends or not. However, since the OP’s daughter was not back at the room when the decision was made that the roommate needed to go the hospital, it was not her call to make the decision to tell the RA.</p>
<p>edit: there’s always an RA somewhere. Always. Can you imagine the liability of the school if there were an emergency and no one could find an RA. </p>
<p>I remember a friend in college calling me one time from the ER to come pick her up around 6AM because she’d overdrank (there might have been a drug or two involved, too). To this day, I can’t remember how she got there (perhaps an ambulance), but once she was released, she called me to pick her up. Didn’t call a roommate… called me, which was fine. We were seniors, and she was totally embarassed, but more fearful that her parents might somehow find out if any of her friends had been at the hospital with her, and felt compelled to call them, without her permission. I do think the timing of 4-5 hours is not uncommon; it’s plenty of time to get a banana bag going and see how the person responds. They don’t need to keep you there until your system if free from alcohol, just until they see you’re not at any risk for further distress.</p>
<p>BTW, it’s HIPAA… don’t mean to sound picky, it’s just one of my pet peeves since I work in health care. Whenever I see HIPPA, I think of the big fat animal you see at the zoo.</p>
<p>OP-
How did your dau’s roommate handle your d’s 2 week illness? Was she helpful? Offer assistance? Or ignore?</p>
<p>About RAs: Usually, they’re kids, too. Heaps of responsibility dumped on them for their (or anyone’s) age. I think we need to re-think the RA system.</p>
<p>At older s’s school, the RA was a grad student and his wife who lived in an apartment of sorts in the dorm. I like that idea. Additionally, with the Residential college system, there was also a faculty member and his wife there too whe could be called as well. When my s broke his leg and had surgery across country during spring break (no pun intended) that’s who I called. They were very helpful in arranging temporary handicapped resources.</p>
<p>
Being the optimistic sort here, I’m sure that most everyone involved learned a lesson of sort. Glad that RM stepped up to the plate and apologized for being the catalyst to that whole episode.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ll take bluealien’s directions one step further, in case you want the name of whom you are quoting.</p>
<p>[ quote = " name of person quoted " ] Put text here [ / quote ]</p>
<p>I left spaces inside the brackets in the example, but there should be none. Pretty much you just write the name of whom you’re quoting inside the quotation marks - and don’t forget the =.</p>
<p>I was pretty sure I was misspelling HIPAA – I’ve read enough about it in my field – I was just too lazy to check:)</p>
<p>This is from ED.gov
</p>
<p>Many schools and parents have misinterpreted FERPA as to parents have no right to student’s information once they turned 18.
In this case, the school could call the RM’s parents to let them know the daughter was taken to the hospital for underage drinking and was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.</p>
<p>I’m thinking that perhaps the reluctance to call an RA was fear of consequence of pre-gaming in the dorm. In my daughter’s freshman dorm, their rooms were periodically checked by the RA’s for alcohol. I know of at least two freshmen who were kicked out of the dorm for underage possession of alcohol in the dorm. The pre-gaming has always scared me and it is very common, especially for those underage.</p>
<p>I think freshman are more at risk of alcohol poisoning than upper classmen are if not simply because they learn their limits. All the freedom with no parental oversight tends to kill common sense sometimes but after they get sick, hopefully they’ll learn. I think if it repeats, friends won’t tolerate it because they don’t want to have to take care of someone all the time. My daughter has said before that nobody wants to be that person who has to be taken care of.</p>
<p>on a lighter note- I called my D today and said “if you’re going out tonight be safe and be smart” she said “We’re staying in a watching a movie!” If that could only last for the rest of the school year I’d certainly sleep better! Movie Thursday is much better than “thirsty Thursday”.</p>
<p>Take care everyone :)</p>