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Hypothermia
Pretty exciting weekend
Friday night, Laura, my brother and I went to a local bar that was having a Makers Mark Ambassador party (My brother and I are both Ambassadors... special access to partys, bottles, etc) with the president and master distiller of Makers Mark in attendance. Good times, got some cool stuff, and had some good Makers!
Makers Mark sponsors the Lane's End Stakes (Big Horse Race about 5 minutes from our house) every year. Each year for the past 6 years, they've release a special limited edition bottle featuring a local famous athlete. Previous bottles include Johnny Bench and Oscar Robertson. This year was Boomer Esiason. 6000 bottles were released this year. I had managed to get 6 of them. The morning of the race, the person featured on the bottles does an autograph signing, where he, along with the president of Makers Mark and the president of Turfway Park (Where the race is held) signs the bottles from that year. They give out only 400 tickets for the signing, first come first serve, and each ticket lets you get 2 bottles signed. So there ends up only being 800 signed bottles available. Previous years bottles I've just bought on ebay after the fact. This year, I decided to get my own bottles signed.
After doing some research, I discovered that the line starts the night before the event, and people camp out all night. So after we left the Makers party at the bar, my brother and I went to the horse track, about 8:30pm. One of Joe's friends from Columbus had driven down and was saving us a spot in line. When we got there, we put out our chairs, and went into the track for some dollar beers. We sat in there and had a few rounds until they stopped selling at 10:30, then went back out to our spot in line.
We spent the night playing beer pong, hanging out with other crazy folk, and just having a good old time. Luckily for us, the temperature dropped down to about 30 during the night, which kind of sucked. But overall, a good time. About 7am, a girlfriend of the guy in front of us in line we'd been hanging out with all night brought us all hot chocolate, which went down VERY well after the night in the cold. 9am rolls around, we got the 6 bottles signed, and headed back to our house. I gave one bottle to my brother and one to his friend, for camping out with me, kept one for myself, and I've got 3 more, which I plan to use to trade for older bottles that I don't have in my collection. We napped from about 11am-4pm, got up and had some food, watched some basketball, and then Joe and his friend left about 7pm.
About 7:45pm, Joe knocks on our door. I figured he forgot something, he tells me he didn't think he was going to make it home. His hands went numb, the muscles in his body all got tight, and he looked a bit dazed. We figured he just needed some sleep (He hadn't been sleeping well for the past week). So he came in and took a nap for a couple hours. While he was sleeping, I looked up his symptoms online. Muscles become stiff, Weakness or sleepiness, Confusion, Numb hands and fingers and difficulty performing tasks... all symptoms of hypothermia. Oh great! So I took my temperature, and I was at 97.3 degrees. I went down and we checked Joe's temperature, and he was at 96.1 degrees. And this was 12 hours after we'd left the track! So he wrapped up in some blankets, we gave him a heating pad and turned on the heat, and he stayed the night at our place, with instructions to keep monitoring his temperature. His temp (Along with mine) gradually came back up, and by morning he was in the 98 degree range and feeling great, as that was the first night he'd gotten more than 3 hours of sleep in a week.
So we both got some bottles and other goodies from the party and race track, and nobody died... all in all a good weekend =)