As originally published in USA TODAY: A young, pregnant woman and her doctor husband set out from Chicago one beautiful June evening for a baby’s-coming celebration in Hawaii.
Hours later, she’s pacing the intensive care unit of a hospital in Fargo, N.D., after a medical-emergency landing and a harrowing dash to the emergency room. Her 30-year-old, athletic husband, hooked up to wires and monitors and bags and machines, is near death, the doctors say.
In Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith and Resilience (Random House, 245 pp., ★★★ out of four), Allison Pataki (the daughter of former New York governor George Pataki) tells the story of the fear-filled roller-coaster months after her husband, David Levy, had an in-flight stroke on June 9, 2015.
The two had been together since college so she knew he was tough, a fighter. But what she heard that night (not only from the hospital doctors but also from the carefully chosen words of Levy’s father and brother, also doctors) was that his prospects were very grim.
Continue Reading on USA Today ‘Allison Pataki writes memoir of her husband’s stroke, when he was only 30‘
