My husband is the youngest in his family and I am the oldest in mine. There were no weddings in his family after ours and no weddings in my family before mine. Which meant that I never had the privilege of attending the wedding of a sibling or sibling-in-law until my younger brother Eli got married a full eight years after I did.
Things did not quite go as planned however. My husband who has a history of serious eye problems awoke the day after the wedding seeing brown patches in his field of vision. After a flurry of phone calls to medical referral experts we found ourselves in the posh Manhattan office of a world-famous retina specialist whom I’ll call Dr. Henshaw.
“It’s a giant retinal tear” Dr. Henshaw pronounced marveling at the unlikely angle at which my husband’s retina had torn. I didn’t find the diagnosis quite as enthralling as he did.
From there things moved very quickly. Dr. Henshaw’s next surgery date was the following day Friday and my husband was given a slot for emergency retina surgery at 12 noon. Since the surgery was scheduled on an outpatient basis I was still hopeful that we could somehow make it to the Shabbos sheva brachos. But that hope was quickly dashed when Dr. Henshaw cheerfully informed us that he would see us in his office Saturday morning at 10 a.m.
Now we would have to find Shabbos accommodations in Manhattan. Gulp.
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