He’s never been there before, but my husband drives through Arizona like he’s a native. Our kids bicker in the backseat as he squints into the Southwestern sunshine. 

The highway carves a groove into the hills. Forests of saguaro fade to arid plains. Endless interstate stretches through hours of tanned earth, unfurling at the feet of piney, snow-capped forests. Our rental car pushes higher and higher. We tug layers over jeans and t-shirts.     

Three thousand feet. Four thousand. Five. Six. Seven. 

By the time we reach the Grand Canyon, we’re speechless, reduced to grinning and snapping photos. We gape for hours, breathless. We shake our heads in frozen wonder. We’re frigid in the wind, but ecstatic.

“Can you believe this?” 

“Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“Pictures just don’t do it justice!”

Awestruck and chilled to the bone, we drag ourselves back the way we came. First to Valle. Then Williams. Flagstaff. A stop in Sedona. By the time we arrive in Phoenix hours later, shedding layers of outerwear as the temperature climbs, I’m breathless. Maybe it's the thrill of travel, maybe it’s something more. Nausea drags me under as our car skates over enormous hills. Each descent makes my head throb. Anxious. Dizzy. Sleep-deprived from insomnia. Head pounding, I close my eyes and focus on breathing. When I open my eyes again, my husband glances between my face and the road. His brow furrows. I know this look. 

“You’re going to the ER,” he announces. 

There’s no room for arguing, not with an ER doctor like him. He’s a born diagnostician. A scientist’s mind, a surgeon’s hands, a pediatrician’s heart. He doesn’t second-guess himself about medicine. 

I have the iron will, but he has the steel-trap mind and strong gut. He’s Mr. Steady, I am a living rollercoaster. He’s the strong, silent type, I’m the strong, noisy type. 

“Cowboys,” other doctors call ER doctors, as if they’re reckless. But they’re not. Nothing like cowboys, except for their courage, their audacious calm despite chaos swirling around them. Pioneers dressed in white coats instead of spurs. 

Years ago, my husband’s senior thesis stated, “There’s no running in the ER.” He graduated from an Emergency Medicine residency in Tampa. “Someone’s going to get hurt,” he said sensibly when he presented to his peers. Made of granite.

As he drove, I fought to keep the dizziness at bay. Even if I could force myself to argue with him despite the timpani drum beat of pain in my head, it wouldn’t matter; he was the one driving. My first stop inside an ER in fifteen years. I gulp at air and grit my teeth against the pain and crashing nausea.

I’m stuck, weighed, prodded, labeled, and deposited in a bed, still shaking and miserable under lights brighter than the surface of the sun. A cousin comes to rescue our kids. My husband sits next to my ER bed, eyes glued to me every time I glance at him. He holds my hand, glances at the monitors, bounces his knee impatiently. I know he wishes he was in charge. Wishes he could see the printouts and the labs and the EKG strips. 

It’s hours before we know what’s happening.

“Just a bad case of altitude sickness,” the ER doctor finally says. “You need fluids. And meds. Decadron, Compazine, Benadryl.” 

The pace of the trip, the fast climb was brutal. I melt with relieved tears and fall asleep under blazing fluorescents while medicine surges. Four sticks, tubes of blood, an I.V., two E.K.G.’s. Worry recedes like moisture on sand. My husband’s still holding my hand when I wake, very much alive and discharged.

“I gotcha,” he says. “I’ve got everything.” 

He leads me outside by the hand. It’s dusk. I have no recollection of where we parked, but it’s okay. He knows where we’re going. He always has. 

-Esty Loveing-Downes

Esty Loveing-Downes (she/her) writes from Florida. Her words can be found in West Trestle Review, Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Survivor Lit, and the Santa Clara Review, or on Twitter at @estywrites.