Last week, I wrote about the accident my dad had in Tahiti, and how we needed to fly out there as quickly as possible to get him home. Here’s the next part of the story…

Getting a passport the regular way takes months. Even with the state department’s expedited passport service, it still takes two weeks to renew one. I knew this because I’d traveled overseas on short notice for work last year and had to fork over the extra $90 to make sure I’d get my new passport in time.

I figured my brother didn’t stand much of a chance in getting his renewal. But John was still our best chance because my other brother, who is also a doctor, was also without his passport—his was in San Francisco awaiting a visa so he could travel to China with his family.

John drove the three hours to Chicago holding a faxed summary of my dad’s injuries to make his case for what the state department bluntly calls “life or death emergencies.”

I can imagine they see all sorts of jokers trying to make the case that their seasonal allergies are a life-or-death situation. On rarer occasions, they get people like us, who on the one hand want to deny they are actually facing a life-or-death situation, and yet on the other hand know they have to face the awful facts and then throw themselves on the mercy of bureaucrats.

It’s a terrible feeling, made worse by the knowledge that your crisis moment is someone else’s business-as-usual.

I couldn’t help but remember the story I’d once heard in college, that a friend of friend was studying in Egypt and died in an accident. Word didn’t reach her mother for two weeks, and I always thought that would be the worst kind of horror, realizing that you’ve been going about your business for days or even weeks without knowing that the person you loved best was gone. How sick that mother must have felt.

In a crisis, it feels like the whole world should just stop with its pointless spinning: the honking of cars, the ringing of phones, the coming and going to wherever it seems so urgent to be when you’re just having a normal day. We should know immediately something is amiss. The sea of activity should part so we can race through and take care of the person who needs us right away.

But this doesn’t happen. Not for any of us. And it’s just a reminder that all the chaos and hubbub of the world can make itself seem an utterly indifferent place. The world keeps on spinning, even for people living in the nauseating suspended animation of shock.

While I waited to hear that my brother wasn’t going to be able to come with us, I imagined the hours that had passed already since my dad’s accident, starting from the moments he was thrown from that ATV, lying on the rocky ground in what must have been terrible pain.

Someone who loved him should have been with there from that first moment of suffering. But of course, if someone had been there, it would have been my mom. She would have been on the back of the ATV, which had rolled down a steep, rocky hill after my dad flew off. Had she been riding with him, she very well might have been killed.

Though I had quietly frowned to learn that my mom wouldn’t be traveling with my dad, it struck me that was our first bit of luck, after all. She, at least, was safe.

Our second bit was that one of my dad’s fellow travelers was a retired anesthesiologist. He was the one who was able to summarize the injuries and send word of them—in English—to the passport office for life-and-death emergency consideration.

But what made the biggest difference was the sort of luck you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie. When my brother stepped up to the passport office in Chicago, the person behind the desk recognized him.

“You were my doctor,” she said.

I don’t know what sort of medical problem she had, as my brother would never talk about such things. But he is a head and neck surgeon, and quite regularly removes horrible cancers from the most tender of places. His patients are often gravely ill with conditions that no doubt make them and their families wish the world would stop its ceaseless, noisy spinning. No one does, of course, but there’s no one like a good, caring doctor to at least make you feel like you have an ally in the midst of the fray.

That woman slowed down the world just enough for us. In three hours, my brother had his passport. Three hours! I don’t think you could get faster service if you were royalty.

What’s more, he would make it to Los Angeles in time to join us on our overnight flight to Papeete. The same flight, even. He’d booked it on faith, and his faith had won out.

There was just one more problem, really. A small one, but still…

My mom, is a creature of habit (which explains her reluctance to go to Tahiti). She really wanted a nonfat vanilla latte. She has one every night. But the airport in Los Angeles isn’t like the one in Seattle—in other words, there aren’t Starbucks every 20 feet (sometimes, it feels like Seattle has Starbucks inside of Starbucks, just in case people get a coffee itch when they’re waiting for their espresso to be pulled.)

So when my brother called to say he was on his way to the terminal, I asked if he’d get my mom her latte first. He did—only to call five minutes later saying security wouldn’t let him bring it through because it was more than two ounces. He drank it while he was on the phone with us, telling my mom how good it tasted.

It was the first laugh we had all day. Little did we know how much we’d need that humor when we first saw my dad a few hours later.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Next week: Getting Dad home