What Does a PARTY Mean to You?
Hanging out with friends, socializing drinking, drugs, dancing, eating, fighting, sex, vomiting? Sounds like a party.
Our P.A.R.T.Y. is an acronym, which stands for Prevent Alcohol and Risk-Related Trauma in Youth.
Now this may not seem like your definition of a party but we want to make the good times last by showing you how to make smart choices in your life. Then you'll get out of your teen years, and into your twenties, thirties,...... P.A.R.T.Y. focuses on making smart choices. You are going to see some people who unfortunately made some pretty bad choices or who had someone make a bad choice for them and are now having to live with the consequences. And these are the ones who survived.
What's Your Choice?
There is only one person who can choose whether you get behind the wheel of a car when you are impaired, or whether you will wear your helmet the next time you ride your bike, or wear protective gear when playing sports: YOU! The consequences of your choices will either maintain your independence or lead you to injury. Read on to see how the other parts of the risk triangle affect you.
Independence
At this stage in your life do you need your parents to spoon feed you, take you to the toilet, change your diaper, dress you, move you from your bed to your chair? How would you feel if you lost your independence and your parents, brothers, sisters or friends had to do these things for you?
Injuries
Have you ever been injured? Did it alter your independence? Were you able to do the same things as you did before your injury?
With all the medical technology there is a lot we can fix and repair when someone has been injured but there are two parts of your body that cannot be fixed - spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries. Once you've damaged those two parts of your body we can't fix or repair them and that's why the best thing is to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Injuries have no boundaries - they don't care whether you are rich or poor, what race, gender, religion, or age you are.
Injuries can happen to any one of us at any time. We have certainly heard of some of the famous people, who have died, from Princess Diana, Sonny Bono, and Michael Kennedy. These are people who make it big in the headlines. And yet the people we see in out trauma room are just everyday people like you.
In the year 2000, the trauma unit at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada's first and largest trauma centre treated 909 trauma patients of which 13% of those patients died.
The rest were left with various stages of injury.
Almost all of those traumas were preventable. We all think it can't happen to us. But here, you will see people who thought exactly like you. You can see how their lives changed.
Let's set a scenario. You have just written your last exam. You and seven of your friends decide to go out and celebrate. Everyone piles into your car. Since you are only going a short distance - what does it matter if you don't wear your seatbelt? The next morning the headlines read "TWO DEAD, TWO CRITICALLY INJURED, DRIVER CHARGED." This crash will not only affect your life, but those who were injured, or killed, and the lives of all their families and friends. You will also have to live with the fact that you killed two of your friends and permanently injured two others. This was not an accident!
The "A" Word
There is one particular word that we don't use in P.A.R.T.Y. and it's an "A" word. Not the "A" word you're all familiar with. The word is Accident. An accident is an act of fate, something we have no control over and the reason we don't use this word is that these injuries and injury-related deaths that occur are predictable and preventable.
We need to call these things what they are: CRASHES, COLLISIONS, INCIDENTS, MISHAPS, OCCURENCES. They are not Accidents.