Traci Freebairn thought it was just nerves that sent her rushing from her wedding rehearsal dinner to the restroom at Trolley Square. Within minutes, though, she was on the ground, felled by a stroke at age 25.
A kind woman offered to get her help. She managed to mumble that she wasn't drunk and didn't know what was happening. "Wedding party" at the restaurant, she whispered. The woman found her family.
Relieved to wake up Saturday in the wee hours and find herself alive, though in intensive care, she was immediately distressed to realize that it was supposed to be her wedding day.
And so it became.
With about 50 people packed into the chapel at University Hospital, including a trio of late-addition guests who are nurses from the intensive care unit, Freebairn and Jason Hawk exchanged vows and were pronounced husband and wife by the same man who just hours before had given her a special blessing, LDS Bishop Richard Metcalf. At that time, her family had feared she might die.
The bride wore wheels, in the form of a hospital bed, exchanging her planned wedding dress for a modest gown in speckled blue and white.
The groom did, too.
"My husband's so nice. He put on a hospital gown so we'd match," the new Mrs. Hawk said from her hospital room Monday, which she was hoping to check out of later in the day so she could recover at the home of her parents, Dwayne and Doralee Freebairn.
Her wedding party wasn't quite what she'd planned in another way. One of her bridesmaids had, coincidentally, been taken to another hospital with viral meningitis.
But her in-laws, who'd flown in from Virginia, her family and "friends I've known forever" from all across the country managed to crowd into the chapel for a wedding ceremony made sweeter because a tragedy was averted.
She doesn't know why she had a stroke. As far as she knows, she had no risk factors. But she's adopted, she said, so her genetics are a mystery.
She does know that Dr. Elaine Skalabrin, an assistant professor of neurology at the U. and director of the U.'s Stroke Center, saved her life by administering tPA, tissue plasminogen activator. It's a drug that breaks up a stroke's blood clots and stops the damage, but only if it's administered in a very short period of time.
She was blessed there, too. Her father is a pharmacist and had only to look at her to send for an ambulance, which was there "so fast it was unbelievable," she said. The ambulance crew picked the U. because of its expertise with strokes.
That's where she met Skalabrin.
"She was wonderful. She kept me angry in the ER so I would fight. She was pounding on my chest and I was so angry, but it kept me awake," she said.
After they gave her tPA, they sedated her heavily for several hours. When she woke up, she felt wonderful until she remembered the intimate backyard wedding at her parents' house that was no more.
It was Jason Hawk who said, "Let's do it here." And an impromptu hospital wedding was born.
The Hawks both live in Washington, where she is an accountant studying to be a librarian and he installs windshields. That is likely to change for a while, at least. She needs to stay nearby while she adapts to medication and the reality of what happened to her. She does plan to return to Washington long enough to graduate in June but, for the foreseeable future, they're going to be living in Salt Lake. And she has a fairly intense medical regimen to face, as well.
But she's not complaining.
"I have all my feeling back on my left side. It's like it never happened, except for this brutal shiner," she said with a laugh.
E-mail: lois@desnews.com