Chapter 10

By our third day in the ICU, though Dave was still intubated and mostly unconscious and hooked up to more wires than a computer, the medical team determined that he was stable enough to be transferred by air ambulance from Fargo to Chicago, where Dave’s colleagues at Rush were chomping at the bit to treat him. Two people could fit in the plane with Dave and the EMT team, so we decided that his father and Andy would fly with him; these two would be on hand in case something went wrong medically during the flight. I would fly with Dave’s mom and my parents on a commercial flight at the same time.

As we packed up the hospital room, I remembered a story Dave had told me about getting reamed out by a senior surgeon because he had not removed a patient’s wedding ring in the ER. If the patient had experienced swelling while still wearing the ring, that ring would have caused loss of blood flow and eventually necessitated amputation of the finger. What if there was an emergency while Dave was on the plane? “Andy, do you think we should remove his wedding ring?”

“Probably not a bad idea,” Andy agreed.

But what would we do with the ring? How would we ensure that it got safely from Fargo to Chicago? I didn’t have a chain to wear it around my neck, and none of my fingers were the right size. “Would…would you just wear it?” I asked Andy, somewhat embarrassed to have to ask such a thing.

Andy nodded and slid it on his right hand, and we made some cheesy joke about how others might perhaps assume he was polygamous.

My father had been scheduled to be in New Hampshire that day for several campaign events. Evidently, since he was in Fargo with me, that was not happening. The press had already begun to speculate as to why he had canceled his New Hampshire events, and the rumor mill was churning at full throttle: was Pataki dropping out? Ever the sensitive and thoughtful papa bear, my dad cleared it with me before issuing a statement suspending his presidential campaign and explaining why. Within a matter of minutes, the national news outlets picked up the story and the news spread. Reactions began pouring in from an ever wider circle. One of my dad’s rivals on the trail, Jeb Bush, called to let us know that he and his family were praying for us. My Twitter feed exploded. Prayers and well wishes began lighting up our cellphones. My sister had them saying mass at the Vatican, our good friend Herman Friedman had them dedicating prayer services in Jerusalem. Friends in California had an entire nunnery devoted to our cause; family members in Texas had organized a prayer chain to go around the clock.

I cannot really explain the odd tangle of feelings I carried with me in those first few days. I was so scared—scared that Dave would not be OK. Scared that whatever had caused this the first time might happen again, and that then he might not ever wake up. Scared that life as we knew it was suddenly gone. I was so sad. There were a few times when I just folded into my mother’s or father’s or Louisa’s or Nelson’s arms and wept. At one point I asked my mother if I was going to be a widow, if my baby would grow up without ever knowing her father, without knowing how excited he had been to meet her. The scene from Gone With the Wind flashed across my mind, an overwrought Scarlett O’Hara dressed in black, weeping to her mother, “I’m too young to be a widow.”

But for much of the time I was in this odd state of calm. Maybe it was denial; maybe it was shock. Probably a sizable dose of each. But I also just had this conviction in my gut that we had so many good people on our side. We were making our case to God with as much gusto as was possible. Our prayers were being heard. And, with Nelson and Andy at the helm, we were tackling everything on the medical side as best we could. Our friends in medicine from Columbia and Rush and around the country were researching and working on Dave’s behalf. I knew that Dave was enveloped in this unbelievable cocoon of love and support and advocacy and positivity. I was scared and sad and distressed, yes, but as bizarre as this may sound, I also felt confident and grateful and at peace; I believed that, somehow, Dave would get through it—that we would all get through it.

As we made our way through security at the Fargo airport, stopping at Subway to grab lunch, I remember thinking how odd it was: we never forgot for a second where we were or why we were there, and yet we were talking about normal things. We were talking about the taste difference between regular and low-calorie baked potato chips. My mom was explaining to us why she liked her brand of suitcase more than the others she had owned. A casual observer would never have known that we were flying alongside our family member who was barely clinging to life.

I looked out the window for the entire two-hour flight, my eyes searching the clouded skies for the companion plane that I knew was carrying Dave in the same direction. When we landed, I got a text message from Andy that Dave had been awake for much of their flight. Andy had explained to him where he was and what had happened and why we were heading to Rush. He had asked Dave if he understood, and Dave had nodded.

In the car from the airport to Rush, I was agitated. It was rush hour, and we were moving very slowly. “He’s awake and I’m missing it! What if this is his first memory and I’m not there? I’m not there to comfort him.”

“Alli,” my dad said, his tone gentle, “if Dave is alert enough to be wondering where you are, believe me, that is a good thing. That’s not a reason for you to be upset; that’s a moment we all hope for.”

We arrived at Rush and joined Dave in his room. How odd it was that our circumstances had led us back to that place where Dave had spent so much time, only now he was there not as a doctor but as a patient.

We met up with Dave’s brother Mike and other members of the immediate family in a large room that the hospital had reserved for us so that we’d have a place to congregate. My niece and nephews bounced around that large family room, delighted at being all together in this new place, at the prospect of so much adult attention. Three little ones whose giggles and innocence now filled the room with an almost festive, family-reunion type of feel.

One of the toddlers was jumping on the couch while the other one darted around the furniture. I was distracted and sad and exhausted and able to focus only on the questions surrounding Dave. The congenial, baby-filled family-reunion vibe felt all wrong to me. I could not play and laugh with those little ones as I had done the previous time I had seen them, just a week earlier. I could not carry myself upright and answer people’s well-meaning questions of how I was doing or make small talk as if things were all right. Things were not all right; my entire life had just been blown apart, and I had no idea how or if I would ever be able to put it back together. I excused myself and returned to Dave’s empty hospital room, where I would wait for him to be rolled back in from his latest battery of tests and scans.

Standing alone in that room, looking out over the city as I awaited Dave, I remember thinking: We’re home, we’re back in Chicago, now what? This was not some temporary thing that, like the hotel room in Fargo, could eventually be checked out of. This was reality—a new, grim, entirely unwelcome reality. A reality we had not expected or wanted any part of, and yet we could not escape.