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Spent the holiday weekend with my girlfriend and friends up on the shore of Lake Superior. It was, for the most part, a relaxing couple of days made up of bonfires, cookouts, hiking, exploring and sitting on the beach. Still down in the lower 30's for evening temperatures, however, and spent all my time in multiple layers of clothing and wishing I had thought about gloves.
We grazed a deer on the way up but everyone, deer included, emerged from the incident unscathed.
Sunday night, however, was an experience I'd care not to repeat. After going out for a late dinner we turned in for the night. As soon as M. got into bed her head stuffed up solid and she couldn't breathe through her nose. Her breath got very wet and raspy sounding, like she had emphysema or something dreadful. I got very scared. She was scared. This sort of thing had never happened before...

I called 911 on my cell phone, which thankfully worked just fine up in the north woods, and found out where the closest emergency room was located (about 45 miles away). As soon as I got off the phone, M. started throwing up. I lost my scaredness and became very calm and focused. I put her in the car and took off through the deer-infested night, praying to whatever gods govern the lives of woodland creatures to please keep them in the ditches and not on the roads because hitting a deer at 95 mph would be a very bad thing. Even though I was exhausted from the day and it was well after 1:00am, I was so pumped up from adrenaline and concern for M. that I'm sure I must've qualified for some sort of Nascar event -- in her convertible Beetle.
Once into Ashland, Wisconsin, I hoped finding the hospital would be an easy task. I was zooming through the town, through stoplights and intersections, scanning the roads ahead when a cop (wouldn't you know it) pulled me over. I was so impatient as M.'s breathing, while improved, was still constricted and the cop was taking what seemed like forever to get out of his car. When he approached the window I handed him my license and said, "Look, I'm sorry, but my girlfriend is having difficulty breathing and I've got to get her to the hospital." He looked quickly at my license and simply said, "Ok." I took off and found the hospital another mile up the road. Time: 2:10 am. Gas tank: past empty.
The doctor examined her, said things looked OK (she was doing better by then) and figured she must've had a nasty allergic reaction to the beer everybody had with dinner. He told her to get some Benadryl and to stop drinking beer and cut out wheat, dairy and eggs until she can determine what sort of allergic reaction she may have experienced.
Being still wired, but feeling how tired I was underneath, I needed to get us back home quickly or I felt I would be too sleepy to safely dodge the animals of the woods. I found an all-night gas station and filled up the car and found out from the attendant that I could have cut cross-country and shaved a good portion of the distance off the trip. Of course.
We pulled back in to the Beach Resort around 4:15 am and promptly fell sound asleep until 11:00 am. Thankfully M. was just fine and we packed up and had a perfectly uneventful trip back home to the Cities.
Lessons learned: Find out where emergency services are located and what their phone numbers are when visiting a new place. Simple to do and it could be critical. Make sure you have fuel in your vehicle. Video games got nothing on deer in the ditches every few hundred yards during an urgent trip in the middle of the night.

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