Elizabeth Vargas hid her alcohol addiction for many years, but after getting the help she needed, she decided to come clean and talk about her experience, hoping to help others by sharing her story. She wrote a book called Between Breaths, A Memoir of Panic and Addiction, which will be out on the shelves September 13th. The 20/20 news anchor talks about one of the scariest experiences of her life when she blacked out for 13 hours and ended up in a New York City hospital unaware of how she got there.
“It was terrifying once I started to hear the particulars,” Vargas, 54, tells PEOPLE Magazine. “I will never know who that person was that saved my life.” She woke up at the hospital unaware of how she got there, and to this day, she still doesn’t remember what exactly happened that day or who brought her to the hospital.
“I spent a lot of time and energy after that trying to pry a memory out around that padlocked door, and I can’t,” she says. “I was sure that in a few weeks … I could get something out. No. I don’t remember anything.”
The only thing she remembers is finishing her work at 20/20, and having a glass of wine from a bottle she bought earlier that day, which she then put in her purse, and that is the last thing she remembers.
That day she was picked up by a good Samaritan who saw her wandering the city and drove her home. By the time they arrived at her apartment, Vargas was unconscious and instead, that person drove her to the emergency room. “I’ve heard people talk about it. Some people do black out,” she says. “I had never done that. It was terrible. I could have died.”
Why do people black out when they’re drunk?
Blackouts happen when you consume too much alcohol too quickly. You have a roadblock that basically goes up between the immediate and short-term memories. The brain receptors that create memories shut down, so you only remember things that happen 30 to 90 seconds before the blackout. Partial blackouts are known as “fragmentary” or “brown-outs” and complete blackouts are called “en bloc” where you lose complete memory of the events that day. Women are more likely to blackout than men since their brains tend to recover slower from cognitive impairment and they process alcohol at a slower pace, so more of it enters their bloodstream.