Chapter 3

Dave would not wake up, could not be roused from sudden and abrupt unconsciousness. His six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame was laid flat across a row of airplane seats, a doctor and a nurse and an EMT (all passengers traveling on our flight) huddled around him. The Alaska Airlines flight attendants had Dave hooked up to an oxygen tank while the nurse held tight to his wrist, tracking his pulse. The odd thing was that Dave’s vitals remained stable; he had the look of somebody taking a nap, a person at rest and at peace as chaos unfolded around him.

I sat in the row just in front, watching it all, trying to breathe. I kept hearing concerned, confused whispers from around the cabin.

What’s going on?

He just suddenly lost consciousness.

His wife’s pregnant.

I put my hand to my belly, reminding myself that I needed to stay calm. And yet, Dave was lying right there, unconscious. Completely unresponsive. My big, strong, healthy husband—an athlete, a man whom I’d never seen puff a cigarette, one of the most disciplined, discriminating eaters I knew, a doctor, for crying out loud!—would not respond to a team of medical professionals trying to rouse him. What was happening?

As the minutes passed, they tried to get Dave to swallow some orange juice, thinking that perhaps his loss of consciousness was due to low blood sugar. As they trickled the juice down Dave’s throat, he began to choke, his eyes remaining shut as his entire body convulsed and rejected the aspirated beverage.

“He’s having a seizure!” one of the healthcare professionals declared as his heavy frame heaved and shuddered. I shut my eyes, my body curling in on itself. God, why is this happening? What is going on? Dave, what is happening to you? Will you please just wake up?

I knew that if I thought too hard about any one of these questions, my mind would begin to spin out of control, hurling me headlong toward all sorts of dark and terrifying places. Places from which I might not be able to pull myself back. So I just tried to focus on breathing. Inhale, exhale. Let the medical professionals do their jobs. Stay calm. I’ll be here for Dave when he wakes up.

At one point, the EMT tried manual resuscitation, pumping his chest with two hands, but it did not jolt Dave back to consciousness. Half an hour later, when Dave still could not be woken, we decided that we needed to make an emergency landing. A flight attendant used MedLink, an in-cabin service for communicating with the ground in cases of emergency, to find the nearest airport and make sure an ambulance would be waiting on the runway with a team of medical professionals to board the plane and get Dave to a hospital.

“Where are we? Where is there to land?” I asked, looking out the window at a world of black. The sun had set. What was between Chicago and Seattle, I asked myself—would we go to Idaho? Montana?

“Fargo, North Dakota,” the flight attendant answered.

“I don’t know Fargo,” I said. “Are there good medical facilities there?”

The flight attendant returned my gaze. “It’s our only option.”

So, Fargo it was.

They had removed one of Dave’s shoes; I can’t recall why, but perhaps there was a fear of swelling. As I sat there, I clutched Dave’s shoe like I would hang on to a precious relic. Dave’s shoe. A piece of him. How many times had I stared at this shoe and thought nothing of it, or perhaps thought only: I wish he would put his shoes in the closet. I noticed how the shoe felt warm, still warm from his body. Warm from the blood that his heart had pumped through his veins, and I thought back to all the cold mornings when Dave had risen from bed, the night still dark outside the window, to go into work at the hospital. All those times when I had slid over to his vacated side of the bed, the sheets a cozy tangle from where his warm body had just been. And then a question popped into my head: would I ever feel anything that had been warmed by Dave’s body again? If he died, wouldn’t he go cold—wasn’t that what I had always gleaned from the television shows and films? Was this shoe the last time that a part of Dave would feel warm? I held it tighter. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, what is happening?

We landed in Fargo—a vast swath of black with just a few scattered lights in the distance. In the foreground, the ambulance lights spun, a dizzying strobe of white and orange. The emergency medical team boarded the plane and took Dave off on a makeshift gurney of sheets, his body floppy in their arms. I followed behind, still clutching that one shoe, making sure that all four pieces of our carry-on luggage came with us. I recalled a night just a month earlier when Dave had temporarily lost his keys—how frantic he had been because of the work he stored on a USB plug on that keychain, and I told myself that the least I could do for him now was make sure that none of his valuables got left behind.

I passed row after row of tight, concerned expressions, fellow Seattle-bound passengers telling me as I passed that they would be praying for my husband and thinking of our family. I nodded, dazed, thinking: Yes, please do. Please pray for Dave. Please pray for me, because right now I am too scared, too confused, too focused on what the hell is happening inside Dave’s body to have time to pray myself. So, yes, please do that.

These fellow passengers would go on to Seattle. They would tell whoever met them at baggage claim about their eventful flight, about their emergency detour to Fargo. I believed their earnest concern; I believed that many of them would think of us and pray for Dave. But I also knew that, within a few moments of landing, they would go on with their lives, our trauma fading into memory.

The two of us would not make it to Seattle. For us, this was a horror story very much still unfolding, and our route had changed. Our route had changed forever.