<\/p>\n
|HOUSTON — On December 7th Emily Bauer began to slur her speech, stumble, complain of massive migraine headaches and began to turn violent, psychotic, and too difficult for her frightened family to control.<\/p>\n
Her family called for an ambulance to take her to the nearest hospital. But within 24 hours she was being life-flighted from a Cypress-area hospital to the Texas Medical Center, the victim of a massive series of strokes.<\/p>\n
She suffered severe brain damage. She was only 16 years old. And the culprit was synthetic marijuana.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe actually had swelling on her brain that they had to drill into her head to relieve the pressure,\u201d said her father Tommy Bryant. \u201cThey didn\u2019t even know if she\u2019d make it through that procedure. But they had to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily has turned 17 since she has been hospitalized at Children\u2019s Memorial Hermann. But doctors warned her family it could be her last birthday. Doctors discovered that Emily\u2019s brain damage was extensive. She was disconnected from life support. Plans were being made to donate her organs if she died. A month later Emily is still alive but she can\u2019t walk, she can\u2019t feed herself, and she is blind. Recently she began to recognize her parents and is able to have limited conversations. But Bryant and his wife have been given no assurances how much of their daughter will ever come back.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard,\u201d Bryant told us of the now month-long ordeal. \u201cIt literally, the way we\u2019re looking at it now, is we\u2019re gonna re-raise a child. I don\u2019t wish this upon anybody, anybody at all,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Bryant has since discovered that his daughter and her friends were experimenting with synthetic marijuana brands like Kush and Spice that the teens purchased over the counter at a convenience store near her home. Multiple injuries and deaths across the United States have been linked to the products sold as incense or potpourri in small packets and marked with the disclaimer \u201cnot for human consumption.\u201d Lawmakers and municipalities have been struggling for years to outlaw the products and their ingredients.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the chemicals that we\u2019re reading online that are in these things, I mean I wouldn\u2019t put on my grass,\u201d said Bryant.<\/p>\n
The National Institute on Drug Abuse says about 11 percent of high school seniors reported using synthetic marijuana, according to a 2011 survey. And calls about synthetic marijuana to the American Association of Poison Control Centers more than doubled between 2010 and 2011.<\/p>\n
Bryant and his family, with their daughter still in the hospital and hoping she can be transferred soon to a physical rehabilitation facility, have started their own Facebook page dedicated to Emily\u2019s story and the dangers of synthetic marijuana. It\u2019s called S.A.F.E. \u2013 Synthetics Awareness for Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we reach one more kid, a family that doesn\u2019t have to go through this, that doesn\u2019t have to spend hours upon hours, nights upon nights in a hospital not knowing what their kid is going to get back, then I feel like we\u2019ve accomplished one small thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Source: khou.com January 10, 2013 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" |HOUSTON — On December 7th Emily Bauer began to slur her speech, stumble, complain of massive migraine headaches and began to turn violent, psychotic, and too difficult for her frightened family to control. Her family called for an ambulance to take her to the nearest hospital. But within 24 hours she was being life-flighted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}