David Hasselhoff is really struggling with his sobriety. The 55-year-old actor has been reported to drink as much as a gallon of vodka a night, and is suffering from extreme, severe alcohol poisoning as a result. Hasselhoff is currently back in rehab for the fourth time in two months. According to the Enquirer, his alcoholism is tearing his two teenager daughters apart. Hasselhoff has full custody of the two girls since he divorced their mother, Pamela Bach, last year. One would logically wonder how someone with such an extreme addiction could have full custody of his kids – but apparently he’s the lesser of two evils, from most reports. Hasselhoff went on an extreme drinking binge earlier this month – the sort that could kill most people.

[Hasselhoff] was rushed to Los Angeles’ Cedars Sinai Medical Center on Dec. 3 – and again on Dec. 5, the Enquirer has learned exclusively. Even more heartrending, David’s daughters Taylor and Hayley were heading to the hospital to see him “when they got a call that he wouldn’t see anyone,” an insider told the Enquirer. The girls are “devastated – absolutely heartbroken,” added an insider. Pals say the troubled entertainer often guzzles a gallon of vodka a night – and he was “extremely intoxicated” when he checked himself into the hospital Dec. 3. “David was a total mess,” a source revealed. “He’d urinated on himself, and his pants were soaking wet. He was drooling and slurring so badly you couldn’t understand a world he said. He seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. Friends were afraid he was going to die right there!”

[From the National Enquirer, Dec. 24 2007 print edition]

It sounds like Hasselhoff’s friends and family have a really good reason to worry – according to doctors at the hospital, his blood alcohol level was 0.5. Keep in mind the legal limit to drive is 0.08. I was once admitted to the hospital for an allergy attack and put in the same room with a man who had a .6 BAC. At that time I didn’t even know that was possible… at least without dying. Though the man was in and out of consciousness (at one point he rose to yell at me “Abracadabra, I’m going to grab ya! Which eventually morphed into “I’m going to stab ya!”) he was still up and quasi-conscious at times. When I asked the cop who was guarding him about it, he said he’d seen a 0.8 once, and that if a person is a severe alcoholic for long enough, their body can develop a tolerance to a level of alcohol that would kill someone else. For a multitude of reasons, one would logically assume that David Hasselhoff has had a pretty severe drinking problem for a long time. Frankly, it’s amazing that his career hasn’t suffered more as a result. In fact, a TV movie version of Hasselhoff’s show “Knight Rider” is currently being planned, and David is scheduled to make a cameo appearance. I have no idea why, but I’m really rooting for him to pull through this.

Picture note by Jaybird: Header of the Hoff at the red carpet arrivals for the day 2 celebration of the Grand Opening of the Planet Hollywood Resort in Las Vegas on November 18th. Image thanks to Splash Photos.