- Drew Magary had only had a beer or two before collapsing, vomitting, bleeding, and slurring.
- Clinicians almost dismissed him as drunk, but he'd experienced a life-threatening brain bleed.
- Magary writes about learning to live with a traumatic brain injury in "The Night the Lights Went Out."
Drew Magary wasn't one to turn down a drink. His wife's go-to Christmas present for him was a bottle of nice booze, and the Deadspin journalist typically pregamed hosting gigs with a few cocktails because, well, he could.
But one December 2018 night in New York City, the Maryland-based father of three uncharacteristically abstained from alcohol before delivering a monologue for his magazine's tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony.
So when he collapsed, began bleeding profusely, vomit ting, and mumbling nonsense early into the afterparty, his friends knew something was really wrong. And yet, clinicians brushed it off as drunkenness and nearly discharged him with severe brain bleeding, his friends told him later.
Magary, now 45 and still coping with the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury, describes his experiences in the new book, "The Night the Lights Went Out." He's not the only young person with a life-threatening illness to be dismissed by medical professionals under the assumption of inebriation.
Magary's colleagues fought for an MRI that likely saved his life
Magary doesn't remember anything between going to the afterparty at a karaoke bar and waking up from a medically-induced coma two weeks later. For the book, he interviewed his colleagues who witnessed most of it.
One, Jorge Corona, said he "felt a thud" before seeing Magary on his back with his hands curled up to his chest and "slick, deep blood" behind his head.
Another colleague, Kiran Chitanvis, called 911. "The EMTs seemed convinced ... that you were just very drunk," Chitanvis said. Rather than putting Magary in a stretcher, he said, they tried to make Magary walk.
In the emergency room, doctors tried to send Magary home, the book reports. "The doctors and nurses were being so blasé about it, I started to doubt myself and I was like, Okay, maybe he is drunk," Megan Greenwell, then Deadspin's editor-in-chief, told Magary.
But she insisted on an MRI. Results showed blood was seeping through cracks in Magary's skull. He'd suffered a brain hemorrhage that was on track to kill him, he writes.
His blood alcohol level was 0.016 — reflective of less than one beer.
He was in coma for 2 weeks
Magary was intubated and sent to another New York hospital better equipped to deal with brain trauma. He underwent an emergency surgery involving holes being drilled into his skull to stop the bleeding and drain the fluid buildup.
Typically, the surgeon said, if patients like Magary aren't in surgery within four hours, they have "no chance of living." Magary's surgery was over six hours after his collapse.
While Magary survived, his life is forever changed. He lost hearing in one ear, much of his sense of taste and smell, some of his memory, and thousands of dollars. He went from exhuberant to so unpredictably cranky that, at one point, his kids began to fear him.
"The more I tried to be that Other Drew, the more frustrated I became," Magary wrote. "I had to give in. I had to understand that my injury had not only changed me but also changed everyone I loved."
Other young people have been dismissed with serious conditions
While Magary's book focuses on his experiences learning to live with disability, not his interactions with healthcare professionals who his friends say blew him off, that part of his story isn't unique.
Brittany Scheier previously told Insider about waking up in the middle of the night with extreme nausea the day after celebrating her 27th birthday at wineries. She couldn't move the right side of her body, stand up, or reach for things. Her vision narrowed to a pinprick.
But in the emergency room, doctors kept asking: "Did you do drugs? It's OK [if you did],'" Scheier said. They almost sent her home. But Scheier had suffered two strokes, and doctors didn't know if she would survive. Scheier is now advocating for young women to speak up for themselves and know the signs of stroke.
"So many times I hear, 'I was listening to the doctor. Maybe they're right,'" Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, an American Heart Association Go Red for Women volunteer medical expert, previously told Insider about Scheier's story. "No one knows our bodies as well as we do. Nobody is living in our bodies. We know when we're not OK."