On May 6, 2023, about 10 minutes after they were pronounced husband and wife in front of 120 guests, Dr. Erika Frances Amundson and Eli Brownlie Newell were in the back of an ambulance speeding toward Los Angeles General Medical Center. From his gurney, as sirens wailed, Mr. Newell signed their marriage certificate.
Major medical decisions awaited them, and he wanted Dr. Amundson to make them as his wife.
Dr. Amundson, a resident in pediatrics, had already been the one to decide that Mr. Newell was in no shape to continue the wedding celebration. Friends at Millwick, an events space in Los Angeles’s Arts District where they exchanged vows, thought Mr. Newell had fainted from a combination of wedding-day emotion, exhaustion and dehydration, but his momentary facial droop told Dr. Amundson otherwise.
“She instantly recognized something else was wrong,” Mr. Newell said. Hours later he was in open-heart surgery for a tear in his aorta, a serious condition known as aortic dissection.
While Dr. Amundson sat under the emergency room’s bright lights that night trying to process what was happening, Dr. Stephanie Zia, dean of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, where Dr. Amundson would complete her medical degree one week later, sat with her. Dr. Zia just happened to be on call at the hospital that night.
“I was in my wedding dress in the emergency room,” Dr. Amundson said. “She really supported me.”
Dr. Amundson, 33, and Mr. Newell, 46, met in September 2014, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles, where both lived. Mr. Newell’s monthly dating game show was in its third year of fixing up men who were on a dating app with blind dates for a live audience at the theater. “The whole idea is that guys are terrible at dating and need help,” he said.
