On May 6, 2023, about 10 minutes after they were pronounced husband and wife in front of 120 guests, Dr. Erika Frances Amundson and Eli Brownlie Newell were in the back of an ambulance speeding toward Los Angeles General Medical Center. From his garage, as sirens blared, Mr. Newell signed their marriage certificate.
They had important medical decisions to make and Dr. Amundson to make them his wife.
Dr. Amundson, a resident physician in pediatrics, had already decided that Mr. Newell was unable to continue with the wedding celebration. Friends at Millwick, a venue in the Los Angeles Arts District where they exchanged vows, thought Mr. Newell had passed out from a combination of wedding-day emotions, exhaustion and dehydration, but the momentary droop of his face told Dr. Amundson otherwise. .
“He immediately recognized that something else was wrong,” Mr Newell said. Hours later he was in open-heart surgery for a tear in his aorta, a serious condition known as an aortic dissection.
While Dr. As Amundson sat under the bright lights of the emergency room that night trying to process what was happening, Dr. Stephanie Zia, the assistant dean for career counseling at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, where Dr. week later, he sat down with her. Dr. Zia just happened to be on duty at the hospital that night.
“I was in my wedding dress in the emergency room,” said Dr. Amundson. “He really supported me.”
Dr. Amundson, 33, and Mr. Newell, 46, met in September 2014 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles, where they both lived. Mr. Newell’s monthly dating game show is in its third year of fixing men who were on a dating app with blind dates for a live theater audience. “The whole idea is that men are terrible at dating and need help,” she said.
Mr Newell, his co-host and the audience would criticize the hapless contestant as he cycled through a 10-minute on-stage ‘date’ sequence with three women. Dr. Amundson, then 24 and an assistant at what was then known as 20th Century Fox, had been recruited to repair that night.
“It was pretty out of character for me,” he said. “But my friend vouched for the legitimacy of the show” and convinced her. Mr. Newell had texted her with the details. Before the show, she did a Google search and saw his picture. which helped her identify him in the green room.
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“I immediately had Eli as someone I would go on a date with,” she said. “He was funny and charming. And he immediately made me feel comfortable.” The contestant he met on stage wasn’t all that memorable.
For Mr. Newell, none of the women he had asked to appear on the show were as memorable as Dr. Just before they met in the green room, “I saw this beautiful, six-foot-tall model walk by,” he said. He assumed he was on his way to a nearby salon that attracted celebrities. But no — “It was Erica.”
After the show ended, Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell went to a mixer at Birds, a nearby bar, with the other contestants and the audience. Dr. Amundson, still in the company of her host, struck up a conversation with him. “But then the guy I was on the date with showed up and was trying to talk to both of us,” she said. Mr. Newell thought quickly. “I was like, ‘Hey man, I think that second girl really liked you,'” he said. The man took the hint.
October brought a series of dinner and karaoke dates. “One thing that really melted my heart was that karaoke night early on when Erika sang ‘Fancy’ by Iggy Azalea,” Mr Newell said. “She was this shy girl, up there rapping. It was so impressive.”
By November, Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell were a couple. While at his apartment, she said, “he asked me to be his girlfriend while we were watching ‘Black Mirror.’ It was a long time in 2014.”
Dr. Amundson, who grew up in Glendale, California, just outside of Los Angeles, has a degree in art history from Georgetown. After graduating in 2011, she returned to California and found an apartment in West Hollywood. He worked as an executive assistant, first at William Morris Endeavor and then at 20th Century Fox.
In 2015, after just moving into Mr. Newell’s apartment in the Silver Lake neighborhood, where they still live, he decided to switch careers and become a doctor. To pay for medical school at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, she waited tables, taught and worked in a school lab and bowling alley, finally enrolling in 2019. In May 2023, one week after her wedding, she earned a B.A. medicine. He is now a pediatric resident at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Mr. Newell, a native of Lake Oswego, Ore., has a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Wesleyan University. “I have a lot of learning disabilities,” she said. “Whatever kept my interest was what I studied.”
After college, he moved to New York City to perform and work as a manager at the Upright Citizens Brigade, a comedy training center and improv and sketch theater. In 2010, she moved to Los Angeles to help launch the live dating show, which ran until 2017.
When he and Dr. Amundson married last year — he proposed with his grandmother’s diamond ring during a December 2021 vacation in Paris — has been plugging TV shows and developing ideas for new comedy shows.
Mr. Newell also took care of his health. “I’ve always been an athletic guy,” he said. On his wedding day, “I was in amazing shape,” he added, having spent the previous 18 months training to look good in his tuxedo. Aortic dissection came seemingly out of nowhere. “I have no family history, medical or genetic risks that would cause this,” she said.
Details of the immediate aftermath, when the couple enjoyed a private moment after the ceremony in Millwick’s bridal suite, are still murky. Friends like Chad Carter, a best man, helped fill in the gaps. “We went from wedding attendants to injury MCs,” he said. When Mr. Newell was discreetly loaded into the ambulance, the reception was just beginning. “We told everyone that Eli passed out and had to go to the hospital,” Mr Carter said, “but they want us to keep the party going.” Now, “it sounds macabre.”
For Mr. Newells’ friends who hadn’t made it to the wedding, the situation seemed unreal. Mr. Carter met several such friends who were unaware of the emergency during Mr. Newell’s 11-day hospitalization, first at Los Angeles General Medical Center and then at USC’s Keck Medicine, where he was taken for open-heart surgery. “When I told them what happened, it would take 30 seconds for them to respond,” he said. “They thought I was messing with them.”
No one wished the emergency was a hoax more than Dr. Amundson. “When they came out of the emergency room and told me they didn’t see any signs of a stroke, but they told me his blood pressure was different between his two arms — that’s classic aortic dissection,” he said. After the surgery, they learned that if left untreated, many people can die from aortic dissection and some people need amputations.
Through what the couple called serendipity, heart surgeon at USC’s Keck Medicine, Dr. Sanjeet Patel, specializes in aortic dissection and performed the open heart surgery. Mr Newell also needed surgery on the connective tissue surrounding the muscles in both legs to allow blood flowing through the tear in the aorta to return to his legs and prevent nerve damage there. A vascular surgeon, Dr. Sukgu Han, performed the leg surgery. Mr. Newell called them a group of “miracle workers.”
However, Mr. Newell could not avoid months of rehabilitation. “When we got home, we spent what would have been our honeymoon on the couch watching ‘Drag Race’ or ‘Survivor’ or any number of shows,” Mr. Newell said. A friend helped him relax most of a complicated honeymoon he was planning in Europe and recover most of the money.
By summer, Mr Newell, who now has scars running the length of both his legs, was able to walk without assistance. He and Dr. Amundson decided they should remarry. “We knew right away that our marriage story couldn’t end with May, that we weren’t just going to move on,” said Dr. Amundson. A check of her vacation schedule showed two weeks off in February 2024.
On February 23, Dr. Amundson and Mr Newell reassembled their wedding party, priest and most of their guests for a second ceremony, this time at the Grass Room, a Los Angeles venue under the same ownership as Millwick. Marvimon, the company that manages both, had offered them a big discount. Other vendors they worked with at the first wedding, such as the florist and caterer, did as well.
At the first wedding, they read handwritten vows in front of their guests and Matthew Donnelly, the priest and friend of the Catholic Life Church who married them. In the replay, they felt less of a need to make public statements about their allegiance.
“We just wanted to get through the ceremony,” Mr Newell said. Dr. Amundson walked down an outdoor aisle again, but this time unaccompanied by her father, Peter Amundson, and wearing a new white wedding dress she bought on a whim on a New Year’s Eve trip to Las Vegas. Mr. Newell wore the same tuxedo, but with a different shirt. the original had his body cut up by the paramedics.
The toasts at the reception were noticeably light on advice for building a strong marriage. “I think my father would usually be like, here’s the tip,” said Dr. Amundson. Instead, “he said, ‘Yeah, you don’t need our advice.’
On this day
when February 23, 2024
Where The Grass Room, Los Angeles
Mission accomplished “I’ve never been the little girl who dreams of her wedding, and I’ve been a little more hands-off than many brides when it comes to planning,” said Dr. Amundson for both the May and February celebrations. But traditions like the father-daughter dance she had with Mr. Amundson at their February wedding are more important now. “When you don’t get to have some of these things, you don’t realize how much it means to you.” She and Mr. Newell chose Jo Stafford’s version of the classic “You Belong to Me” for their first dance.
Two Hearts, Broken Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell did not exchange rings again on their second marriage. But Mr. Newell wears two rings now. In addition to his wedding band, he wears a ring engraved with a heart—an imperfect, hand-painted heart. While he was still intubated last May, a nurse gave him a pen to write a note. Draw a heart instead. The couple transferred the image to their ring. Dr. Amundson wears a necklace with a matching engraved locket.
Almost ready Mr. Newell still has numbness in his right shin and nerve pain in his right leg, but is otherwise on the mend. A new aortic valve should be replaced every five to 10 years. After the aorta was cleaned, he lost 30 pounds of muscle, which Dr. Amundson said he is recovering.