Managing mayhem: How doctors handle seasonal chaos

Spring break comes, and students flock to the beach. Risky behavior abounds -- everything from too much time in the sun to binge drinking and casual sex. Sometimes, the consequences are disastrous.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. March 3, 2003.

Frederick Epstein, MD, chair of emergency medicine at Bay Medical Center in Panama City, Fla., a popular spring break city, is ready for the onslaught.

Between the end of February and the end of April, 400,000 students will descend on his resort town of just more than 100,000 residents. He's done what he can to prepare. He's arranged for the extra staff that treating them will require. And he's sent his ambulances to sit at the beach and wait for the injured.

When it's all over, he'll be burned out from the thousands who come through his emergency department. He knows what to expect. In the past, he has treated students drunk to the point of alcohol poisoning and drugged to unconsciousness. He has also treated severe trauma injuries after students try to jump from one hotel balcony to another and miss, or when they jump down, aiming for the pool.

He also likely will see brutal injuries caused by drivers whose judgment is clouded by youth, inexperience and booze. Sometimes they hurt themselves, but more often they hurt pedestrians along the main drag that parallels the beach. Sometimes it is the passengers who lose their grip while hanging out of cars. And there are victims of sexual assault, and even those with blistering sunburns.

"We brace emotionally, and I'm very happy when they're all gone," said Dr. Epstein, who is also medical director for Bay County Emergency Medical Services.

"I've grown weary after some years of finding myself having to make a long-distance phone call to an unwitting parent who doesn't even realize that their son or daughter is in Panama City," he said. "It's always difficult to preside over the pronouncement of death of anybody, but it's particularly difficult when I have to call and wake someone up in the middle of the night to tell them that their son or daughter has expired down here. They're strangers, and I can't even look them in the face."