When “The Cupid Shuffle” started playing at my friend Crystal’s wedding, I had a hard time breathing.

Stupid asthma, I thought. The month before, an unworried nurse had prescribed me an inhaler and recommended allergy pills for my shortness of breath.

As the R&B called us to dance, a dull pain throbbed in my right calf, like a sprain on day four of rest.

I’d injured my calf that summer, though I wasn’t sure how. I walked and followed Pilates videos with a friend; I didn’t run or lift weights. I didn’t remember any injuries. But it hurt like a pulled muscle.

The pain had been gone for the last few days. And now it was back, heavier than before.

I’ll ice it later tonight.

The song called to “move your muscle,” and I reached down to rub my bare leg.

I’ll just finish this song. Then I’ll rest, I thought.

“You okay?” called Dianna as she shuffled next to me.

“I’m fine!” I shouted.

It’s hot for September.

The rented dance floor lay exposed in the grassy lot beside the church, no shade nearby. Thirty or so bodies pressed around me, the mixture of unfamiliar and familiar faces starting to feel stifling. I stripped off my white cardigan, threw it to my table.

At the direction of the singer, we all kicked like inexperienced soccer players.

The pain cramped my leg.

Just finish.

My head felt heavy as the group turned in unsynchronized uniformity to dance in the other direction.

Still, I kept shuffling and turning, shuffling and turning.

My head felt as though it had grown ten times its size and weight.

When was the last time I drank water? I must be dehydrated.

The DJ faded the music and started a Justin Timberlake song.

My ears started ringing.

I stepped off the tiles to the grass, eyes on my seat and my glass of water.

The deadness spread to my limbs.

“I need to sit down,” I tried to say to Dianna.

Her response came through water, then through gauze, then through earmuffs.

The ringing became louder.

Just walk to the table. Get water. Just step—

Darkness.

 

White walls.

Hospital.

“Keep your arms up and stay as still as possible.”

“But—I—can’t—breathe—can’t—be—still.”

“Just do your best.”

Sliding into a large white tube. Beeps and whirs. Sliding back out. Voices. Jason and Dianna both hovering next to my wheeled bed.

A new man with a thick head of gray-white hair appeared. He introduced himself as Dr. Austin. My mind was clearing enough to panic.

“I was golfing when they called me here,” said the surgeon. “Looks like you’re sick.”

He was joking. He looked worried. He said something about a blood clot, cutting off air, needing surgery. Now.

“I’m getting—married—in two weeks,” I told Dr. Austin.

“We’ll get you there,” he said, his voice more hopeful than his eyes.

“Can I—can I talk to them?” I struggled to turn my head toward Dianna and Jason by my side.

“For a minute. But we need to go right away.”

Dr. Austin left my sight. Jason and Dianna drew closer to my bed railing.

“Should—I—do this? Can—we—pray about—it?”

“Hannah, you don’t have a choice,” said Jason.

Dianna nodded, her eyes shiny and fearful as she squeezed my hand.

But God can heal me. Shouldn’t we wait for Him?

I said nothing.

Jason and Dianna gave a quick prayer, words I would just as quickly forget.

The surgeon reappeared. A nurse approached my side, holding a clipboard and pen. Spasms jerking my fingers, I signed my name. I was wheeled away from Dianna and Jason before I could think to say, “I love you.”

That was all I would remember for days.

 

Long after I first woke up, I would learn what had happened: I had a saddle pulmonary embolism. Blood clots from my leg traveled to my lungs, blocked both sides of my heart. The arteries were “impressively large,” according to the nurses.

The medical professionals explained pulmonary embolisms resulted from high hormone levels in 30-year-old post-partum mothers. They happened to middle-aged smokers after a car accident. They were found in the elderly recovering from hip surgery. They didn’t happen to people like me, a supposedly healthy, recent college graduate barely twenty-two years old. I was the youngest in the cardiac wing by at least a couple of decades. All because I took birth control pills for three months—the “safe” kind.

Later, Dr. Austin would tell me that I was only the third person he had ever operated on who was so desperately ill. The other two did not survive.

Surviving was little comfort.

 

No one said a word about my upcoming wedding.

With each day I was conscious, I hoped maybe the next day I would breathe on my own, sit up without pillows, and walk down the halls I had never seen. And if the next day brought these improvements, Jason and I could move on with our wedding and honeymoon as if this hospital stay were just a nightmare brought on by bridal anxieties.

Dr. Austin had said he would get me to my wedding, didn’t he? I latched onto his words, believing his authority would make them true, that I would not miss this.

But the days scraped by with few victories.

I could breathe without a tube. I could eat food. My eyes focused well enough to watch hours of TLC’s What Not to Wear and Animal Planet’s Too Cute. I could speak, my throat miraculously not sore.

Yet my mouth was full of cuts from intubation, I had the appetite of a mouse, I could not see well enough to read a book, and I still had a catheter. I couldn’t even stand. I was stuck in bed, clutching my heart pillow.

Each day eroded not my faith that God could heal, but my faith that He would.

 

September 16th came quietly.

I did not mention the date scrolled on our invitations, layers of cream and green card stock pressed together by hands of friends.

I pretended the day meant nothing.

September 16 passed quietly.

 

After three weeks of hospitalization, I knew hope of all of my wedding plans were gone. Now my only hope was to go home.

I could walk short distances, as long as a wheelchair was pushed behind me for rest.

I could eat and talk and breathe on my own.

I could see well enough to decipher crossword puzzles.

I was told I might finally leave the hospital.

Then my gastroenterologist entered my room.

“I was thinking about your case last night while lying in bed,” he said. “And I think we need to do an endoscopy.”

He explained why he was concerned about my stomach, what he thought might be the issue, what the test entailed—but I didn’t listen. I didn’t think about this specialist’s dedication, trying to solve my problems well after leaving the hospital for the day. I didn’t even think about how I would be fasting from food and water before the test. I just dwelt on the fact that I would spend at least one more night on this hard hospital bed.

 

The person administering the test ran late. My mouth dried from the lack of water, my tongue just recovering from intubation now exacerbated by its swelling. With each ten, twenty, thirty minutes that passed, I grew angrier.

Why did God let a blood clot nearly kill me? Why let me survive and yet miss my wedding? After Jason and I waited nearly three years to marry, to have sex, to live together—after we took premarital counseling, took personality tests proving our compatibility, were rated as a highly realistic couple—after all the money spent on a dress, cupcakes, a photographer—after we had asked Stan to share the gospel message of Christ’s death for our sins in his wedding sermon—after all this, why would God do this?

And why wouldn’t God even make this damn test start on time?

I heard a knock on the open door.

“Can we come in?” asked an unfamiliar voice.

I turned my head, and my anger suddenly collapsed.

At the end of a leash was a quiet, gold-and-white cocker spaniel.

“We’re here to visit patients. Would you like to meet him?” said the woman, gesturing to her companion.

Of course I said yes.

She lifted the dog onto my bed and he lay next to me, his head in my lap. His well-groomed fur slipped across my fingers like silk, the warmth of his body radiating through the thin, rough hospital sheets.

For once, I was not thinking about the wedding I’d missed.

Instead, this cocker spaniel reminded me of my own dog, Leah, a miniature Australian shepherd who had been the one piece of my life I kept after my mother’s death. I thought of Angel, the tabby cat given to me in the weeks of my parents’ divorce hearings, how she would lower her flabby body into my lap and lick my hands when I was sad. I remembered every animal that had comforted me over the years, every animal I had lost. And now this one, the dog whose name I would not remember later. A comforter.

My mind settled for the moment as the spaniel’s nose burrowed into my hand.

God hadn’t responded. I still didn’t know why I’d survived or why disaster had fallen. I’d still lie awake asking the same questions over and over and over.

But that afternoon, my test was late, which gave a cocker spaniel the chance to visit.

A therapy dog helped me forget everything I was questioning, everything that hurt, everything that depressed me.

I didn’t see a miracle, but I found comfort. And maybe comfort was what I needed to survive.

Hannah Comerford is a freelance editor and writer whose work has appeared in The Unmooring, Ekstasis, and Fathom, among others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop, where she is now Program Assistant. She also serves as Associate Poetry Editor for Fathom. Hannah lives with her husband, son, and dog in Tacoma, WA.

Header image: Poppy Comerford, a rescue dog from Mexico who came into Hannah’s life in January 2020
and made the pandemic years more bearable.