By nine o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t even stand upright on the bathroom floor.
My husband, Adam, found me curled up on the cold tile, sweating through the personalized satin robe his sister had selected in our chaotic group chat months ago.
“We are going straight to the emergency room right now,” Adam said, his face turning pale as he knelt beside me.
“You can’t leave,” I whispered, barely able to force the words past my chattering teeth. “You are supposed to walk your mother down the aisle at eleven sharp. You can’t miss it.”
“Nora, look at yourself—”
“She’s your only sister, Adam. Please go.”
Then the bathroom ceiling tipped violently sideways, the room went entirely black, and I stopped arguing because my body simply surrendered to medical shock.
If Adam had obeyed my frantic pleas and driven to that church, I would have died alone on a hotel bathroom tile from a severely ruptured appendix and a massive internal infection that was already spreading through my bloodstream.
When the emergency transport team brought me in, the attending surgeon used the word “hours”—as in, if my husband had delayed my arrival by a few more hours, they would be having a very different, tragic conversation with my family.
