I got seriosuly f'ed up.

[GTKeeper]

Beer and Scotch DO NOT mix. Every time I have had beer + scotch in serious amounts, it was regrettable the next day.

 

[edro]

I've been there too.
I've only had one hang over that bad though.

Shivering dry heaves... fun, fun fun.

Your body will fix itself.
I slowly drank Gatorade until I stopped puking.
Later that evening I started to eat crackers.

I think the water is just a shock to your massively empty stomach, so you puke it out.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Originally posted by: Clair de Lune
PlasmaBomb, good stuff you wrote there. A lingering question:

I ate at 8pm (had a FEAST), started drinking at 9ish til midnight. Why would my body throw up as LATE as 5am? Was it because the food was 'buffering' the alcohol and my body was effectively still drinking while asleep and when it couldn't take it anymore at 5am, it woke me up to throw up?

This sounds about right, what do you think?

As for:

It is likely that if you threw up at 5 am your are still drunk at 10 am... and it is uncommon* to have a hangover when you are still drunk (you can feel rough and tired, which will get worse as the alcohol leaves...)

As stated, when I woke up at 10am, I was surprisingly okay. No hangover, completely sober, and just exhausted.

It literally came and went like a storm. It's 1pm now, I feel better.

Why would my body throw up as LATE as 5am?
I don't know, I would have thought that you would have thrown up within a couple of hours. I was kind of hoping it was a late one

This is conjecture...

Normally your BAC peaks within 1 hour on an empty stomach (IIRC, it is complicated by %vol etc.), because alcohol is absorbed from the stomach, unlike most things which are absorbed from the intestine, as thus dependant on gastric emptying... (passage of the stomach contents into the intestine).

Food certainly slows the absorption of alcohol, and taking alcohol with a meal will likely result in your BAC peaking later, say around the 2 hour mark after you stop drinking... (hence why I was bitching in the Drink drive thread).

The reason being that meals delay gastric emptying, and the intestine is designed for absorbing nutrients (and in this case alcohol). Its greater surface area results in it being more effective at transporting the alcohol to the blood.

A big meal would require longer to pass through the stomach, so it is possible that having a 'feast' has chronologically spaced the delivery of alcohol to the intestine...

Graph
A = sitting
B = lying down

As you can see, with a big meal it takes a long time for the stomach to empty... (a large meal in the graph is ~ 1.4 lb of beef w/ tomato sauce - think bolognese). Lying down also slows the transit of food from the stomach... as does age...

Teh very mooch conjuncture bit...

So since you had a big meal and gave it some time to settle, it could be the spirits weren't well mixed in your stomach... remaining in the proximal stomach for some time, before being dumped into the intestine.

Although I would have though the beer would have resulted in a semi solid mix (chyme) and have allowed the spirits to mix... *shrug*

Thus when you threw up you removed a good portion of the alcohol...
Hence why you were able to wake up fairly sober...

I would expect vomiting to occur at BAC > 0.2% and elimination to be about 0.02% per hour. Thus if you hadn't got a bolus of alcohol I would expect you to be still visibly drunk after 5 hours...

That explains it but is fitting theory to the facts (bad )

Has the story been confirmed by a non-intoxicated person? There could be another explanation...

Edit: I think re-reading the OP I have overestimated how much you drank...?

 

[spidey07]

When the body goes into "get the fuck out of me" mode it doesn't matter what you put in. It's going to reject it. This is why it's important to stay hydrated after the fact. Ice chips are frequently recommended as it's just enough to not trigger the "get the fuck out of me NOW" mode.

 

[imported_inspire]

Water? No, dude. A liter of Pedialyte, two exedrin, and a double-cheeseburger. That's how you roll.

You need hydration, electrolytes, and carbs. Caffeine from the exedrin will help you make the most of it.

 

[Paperdoc]

I remember being told this little tidbit years ago by a nurse. The human body has lots of mechanisms to counteract the causes of non-ideal conditions and restore the proper balance. This is known as "homeostasis" - the ability to keep the human body in a relatively constant state of balance. Engineers would say this uses a mechanism called "negative feedback" in which the reaction of the body is to oppose the change, thus returning to the "normal" condition. One of the few times that fails is when you drink too much alcohol. Follow the sequence.

The stomach normally has a pretty acidic blend inside it, and one of the sources of acids used to break down food is glands that release hydrochloric acid into the stomach. So the stomach has an "ideal" range both of acid content (often measured as pH) and chloride ion content. If anything changes that, the body reacts by producing more or less hydrochloric acid to re-establish the balance point.

Now we hit a heavy drinking spree. A lot of alcohol (and some food) go through the stomach in a short time. This consumes the hydrochloric acid in the stomach at a very rapid rate. Well, actually, it consumes preferentially the H+ acid ions used in food processing (particularly the alcohol) and leaves behind more than normal amounts of chloride ion. If this continues long enough, the chloride ion level gets so high it triggers vomiting to expel the stomach contents. Recall that one old way to induce vomiting is to drink a glass of very salty water - high chloride ion levels (from salt) will trigger vomiting. So the stomach empties. Often it empties so well it gets rid of too much chloride. A very low chloride ion concentration in the stomach triggers a slightly different reaction, convulsions of the stomach muscles that we call the "dry heaves" because the stomach lining finds this low-chloride ion situation very irritating.

Eventually that relaxes a little and the stomach muscles get tired from all the activity. However, if you suddenly drink a bunch of water, two things happen. It's a shock to the touchy stomach that "wakes it up", AND you suddenly dilute whatever small contents the stomach has, so it now senses again that the chloride ion content is too low, and the "dry heaves" start all over again. This is one case of what engineers call "positive feedback" - the system's reaction (dry heaves to empty the stomach) makes the original change in measured "process conditions" (stomach chloride ion concentration) continue in the same direction it was going, instead of heading back to the oppose the change. The system just keeps getting worse!

The nurse who told me this, in the course of a conversation about maintenance of normal ionic levels in the body, said that the treatment in Emergency Departments for acute alcoholic acidosis patients was to administer a mild solution of electrolytes, intravenously if necessary or as small sips of liquid, until the stomach could be calmed down and normal balance restored in the course of time. Actually, the more serious condition they were treating at the same time with this therapy is to correct the "alcoholic acidosis" part. High alcohol levels in the bloodstream are toxic anyway because the alcohol is a toxin. But the body has an enzyme system to break it down, creating excess levels of acetic acid in the blood which drops the blood pH. That in itself is dangerous, and the electrolyte therapy is designed to re-establish the proper levels of various ions, including acid and pH, in the bloodstream primarily. Improvements in the stomach contents also happen as a result.

From this I expect that several posters' advice to sip water slowly is the best strategy. It provides some water for dehydration, but at a slow pace that won't produce excessive dilution in the stomach or irritation.