ER nurse shares dose of reality with OTHS students

November 9, 2006 

       Filing into the Old Town High School gym last Thursday, there was an air of resignation among the freshman students who had been told to assemble there. Even though they knew that they were on their way to hear an “anti-drug presentation,” they had no idea of what to expect or how much of what they heard would have an impact on their future choices regarding drugs. Many of them had been to anti-drug presentations before and had been warned to stay away from drugs and alcohol. But as soon as Linda Dutil took over the mike, dressed in her green emergency department nurse scrubs, there descended over the teen-age audience an almost palpable sense of renewed interest in what she had to say about an old subject. A lot of that had to do with the fact that Dutil, who works as an ER nurse in Waterville, speaks from experience about what can happen when young people take drugs, drink alcohol, or enable their friends to become involved with substance-abuse.

            Dutil comes out swinging, starting off by announcing to her freshman audience that she is not there to lecture them or tell them what to do.

            “When I was in school, I went to an assembly where the speaker said, ‘Don’t do drugs. If you do, you’ll die.’ Well, I’m not here to tell you that. I’m here to tell you about the results of poor choices that you can make,” she said.

            Dutil spent the next 45 minutes sharing the excrutiating details of those results, at times eliciting laughter from her audience, but more often drawing groans of disgust at the repercussions that come from misusing drugs and alcohol. She starts out by holding up a pair of scissors as she relates the story of a girl who was once a patient in her emergency room.

            “She was fifteen years old, and when her boyfriend dumped her, she got very depressed and went into her mother’s room where she took a pair of scissors from the top of the dresser,” she said. “She then proceeded to cut herself. She came into the emergency room with thirty to forty scissor cuts. She was fine, we gave her antibiotics, and she didn’t die. But the scars from those scissor cuts won’t go away. They’re something that she’ll have to explain for the rest of her life.”

            Dutil ends the sad tale by urging the students to seek out people with whom they can talk about their problems.

            “If you can’t talk to your parents, find someone you can talk to,” she said.

            Dutil shares another story with an even unhappier ending about a boy she refers to as “Bob.” Bob, she says, was a 15-year-old boy who wasn’t interested in alcohol until one day when he went to a party at a friend’s house.

            “Bob arrives at his friend’s house, and his friend sticks a shot glass of whiskey in his hand,” Dutil said. “Bob tried to tell his friend that he wasn’t there for alcohol, but his friend made a joke out of it. He turned to the other guys who were there and said, ‘Hey, don’t you think Bob is a wus?’ And because Bob didn’t want to be called a wus, he started drinking. And he ended up drinking so much alcohol…in this case, whiskey….that it poisoned him.”

            Dutil goes on to explain that what many people don’t know about alcohol poisoning is that one of the things it does to the human body is shut down the respiratory center. This is what happened to Bob, she says, “and he died. It was unbelievably sad. It was totally preventable, totally avoidable.”

            As part of her presentation, Dutil enlists the aide of audience members, as she did when she called two students to join her last Friday. Amid bouts of self-conscious laughter, the two students helped demonstrate the steps involved in pumping the stomach of a teen-ager who has overdosed on drugs or alcohol. As is her style, Dutil pulls no punches when describing the gruesome process. The audience winces as she explains the way in which the pumping tube is inserted via a patient’s nose or mouth, and the gravel-like texture of the raw black charcoal that patients have to drink to help rid their stomachs of harmful substances.

            “When a patient comes into the ER, doctors look at that patient and decide to go with either Plan A or a Plan B,” she said. “Plan A is for when a patient feels sick, but will be all right, Plan B is for when a patient’s life is at risk.”

            Judging from the audience reaction throughout the presentation, it was clear that most of the students present were not interested in being a part of either plan. But Dutil’s talk wasn’t just about what could happen to the teen-age members of her audience who make the wrong choices. It also covered what could happen to their friends and family members.

            “Don’t ever bring a drunken friend home and put them to bed,” she warned. “They can stop breathing and die. Call 911 for help.”

            Switching to the subject of hallucinogens, such as acid, meth, and “magic mushrooms”, she related another unsettling tale about a teen-age girl who took crystal meth and hallucinated spiders crawling all over her body. Trying to rid herself of the spiders, she began slicing her skin with a razor. Like the girl in the first story, this one ended up with a multitude of physical scars to go along with her mental and emotional ones. But one of the strongest moments in the entire presentation came when Dutil revisited her earlier story about “Bob”, the 15-year-old who drank too much whiskey and died of alcohol poisoning.

            “After Bob was pronounced dead, we had to clean the body,’ she said. “As we cleaned it, we were aware that his family was out in the waiting room. So we cleaned up the charcoal and the blood, and then the mother came in and took her son’s lifeless hand in hers. Bob’s father stood beside her and Bob’s two older brothers stood at the foot of the bed. And then we heard a noise in the doorway, and realized that we had forgotten all about Bob’s little sister. She was standing in the doorway, eyes wide open, expression blank. Then all of a sudden she let out a yell and ran over to the bed and threw herself over her brother’s body, screaming, ‘Please, Bobby, don’t die! Don’t die!’”

            As she nears the end of the story, Dutil chokes up and has to pause for a moment to regain her composure. When she does, she makes eye contact with an audience whose members are also fighting back tears.

            “Please,” she told them. “Don’t ever do anything like this to you, your friends, or your family.”