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 gurney, as sirens wailed, Mr. Newell signed their marriage certificate.
Major medical decisions awaited them, and he wanted Dr. Amundson to make them as his wife.
Dr. Amundson, a resident in pediatrics, had already been the one to decide that Mr. Newell was in no shape to continue the wedding celebration. Friends at Millwick, an events space in Los Angeles’s Arts District where they exchanged vows, thought Mr. Newell had fainted from a combination of wedding-day emotion, exhaustion and dehydration, but his momentary facial droop told Dr. Amundson otherwise.
“She instantly recognized 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 aortic dissection.
While Dr. Amundson sat under the emergency room’s bright lights that night trying to process what was happening, Dr. Stephanie Zia, the assistant dean for career advising with the Keck School of Medicine of U.S.C., where Dr. Amundson would complete her medical degree one week later, sat with her. Dr. Zia just happened to be on call at the hospital that night.
“I was in my wedding dress in the emergency room,” Dr. Amundson said. “She really supported me.”
Dr. Amundson, 33, and Mr. Newell, 46, met in September 2014, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles, where both lived. Mr. Newell’s monthly dating game show was in its third year of fixing up men who were on a dating app with blind dates for a live audience at the theater. “The whole idea is that guys are terrible at dating and need help,” he said.
Mr. Newell, his co-host and the audience would critique the hapless contestant as he cycled through a series of 10-minute onstage “dates” with three women. Dr. Amundson, then 24 and an assistant at what was then known as 20th Century Fox, had been recruited for that night’s fix-up.
“It was pretty out of character for me,” she said. “But my friend vouched for the show’s legitimacy” and convinced her. Mr. Newell had messaged her with the details. Before the show, she did a Google search and saw his picture; that helped her recognize him in the green room.
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“I immediately clocked Eli as someone I would go on a date with,” she said. “He was funny and charming. And he instantly made me feel comfortable.” The contestant she met onstage was not quite as memorable.
For Mr. Newell, none of the women he had asked to appear on the show were as memorable as Dr. Amundson. Just before they met in the green room, “I saw this gorgeous, 6-foot-tall model walking by,” he said. He assumed she was on her way to a lounge next door that attracted celebrities. But no — “it was Erika.”
After the show wrapped, Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell went to a mixer at Birds, a nearby bar, along with the other contestants and audience. Dr. Amundson, still taken with her host, struck up a conversation with him. “But then the guy I was on the show date with came up and was trying to talk to both of us,” she said. Mr. Newell thought fast. “I was like, ‘Hey man, I think that second girl was really into you,’” he said. The man took the hint.
October brought a string of dinner and karaoke dates. “One thing that really melted my heart was this karaoke night early on when Erika sang Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy,’” 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 very 2014.”
Dr. Amundson, who grew up in Glendale, Calif., just outside Los Angeles, has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Georgetown. After graduating in 2011, she returned to California and found an apartment in West Hollywood. She 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, she decided to switch careers and become a doctor. To pay for medical school at Keck School of Medicine of U.S.C., she waited tables, tutored and worked at a school lab and a bowling alley, finally enrolling in 2019. In May 2023, one week after her wedding, she earned a medical degree. She is now a resident in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Mr. Newell, originally from Lake Oswego, Ore., has a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Wesleyan University. “I have a mish mosh of learning disabilities,” he said. “Anything that kept my interest was what I studied.”
After college, he moved to New York to perform and work as a manager at the Upright Citizens Brigade, an improv and sketch comedy training center and theater. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to help start 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 to Paris — he was stringing together TV performances and developing ideas for new comedy shows.
Mr. Newell was taking care of his health, too. “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 working out to look good in his tuxedo. The aortic dissection came seemingly out of nowhere. “I have no family history, no medical or genetic risks that would have caused it,” he said.
The details of its immediate aftermath, when the couple was enjoying a private post-ceremony moment in Millwick’s bridal suite, are still blurry. Friends like Chad Carter, a groomsman, have helped to fill in the blanks. “We went from being wedding attendants to trauma M.C.s,” he said. When Mr. Newell was being discreetly loaded into the ambulance, the reception was just starting. “We told everyone, 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.”
To friends of Mr. Newell’s who hadn’t made it to the wedding, the situation sounded unreal. Mr. Carter ran into several such friends who didn’t know about the emergency during Mr. Newell’s 11-day hospitalization, first at Los Angeles General Medical Center and then at Keck Medicine of U.S.C., where he was transferred for open-heart surgery. “When I told them what happened, it would take them 30 seconds to respond,” he said. “They thought I was messing with them.”
No one wished the emergency had been a prank more than Dr. Amundson. “When they came out of the emergency room and told me they didn’t see any signs of stroke but told me his blood pressure was different between his two arms — that’s classic aortic dissection,” she said. After the surgery, they learned that if untreated, many people can die from aortic dissection and some people need amputations.
Through what the couple called serendipity, the heart surgeon at Keck Medicine of U.S.C. on call that night, Dr. Sanjeet Patel, specializes in aortic dissection and performed the open-heart surgery. Mr. Newell also needed surgery on the connective tissue that surrounds the muscles in both legs to allow blood that was rushing to 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 team of “miracle workers.”
Mr. Newell could not avoid months of rehab, however. “When we went 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 unwind most of an intricate, monthlong honeymoon he planned in Europe and recoup most of the money.
By summer, Mr. Newell, who now has scars running the length of both shins, was able to walk unassisted. He and Dr. Amundson decided a wedding redo was in order. “We knew right away the story of our wedding couldn’t end with May, that we wouldn’t just move on,” Dr. Amundson said. A check of her vacation schedule turned up two weeks off in February 2024.
On Feb. 23, Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell reassembled their wedding party, officiant and most of their guests for a second ceremony, this time at the Grass Room, an events space in Los Angeles under the same ownership as Millwick. Marvimon, the company that operates both, had offered them a steep discount; other vendors that they worked with on the first wedding, like the florist and caterer, did too.
At the first wedding, they read handwritten vows before their guests and Matthew Donnelly, the Universal Life Church minister and friend who married them. At the redo, they felt less of a need to make public declarations about their devotion.
“We just wanted to get through the ceremony,” Mr. Newell said. Dr. Amundson again walked down an outdoor aisle, but unescorted this time by her father, Peter Amundson, and in a new white wedding gown she bought on a whim on a New Year’s Day trip to Las Vegas. Mr. Newell wore the same tuxedo, but with a different shirt; the original had been cut off his body by paramedics.
Toasts at the reception were noticeably light on tips for building a sturdy marriage. “I think my dad typically would have been like, here’s advice,” Dr. Amundson said. Instead, “He was like, ‘Yeah, you don’t need our advice.’”
On This Day
When Feb. 23, 2024
Where The Grass Room, Los Angeles
Mission Complete “I was never the little girl who dreamed about her wedding, and I was a little more hands-off than a lot brides in the planning,” Dr. Amundson said of both the May and February celebrations. But traditions like the father-daughter dance she had with Mr. Amundson at the February wedding feel more important now. “When you don’t get to have some of that stuff, 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, Unbroken Dr. Amundson and Mr. Newell did not exchange rings again at their second wedding. But Mr. Newell wears two rings now. In addition to his wedding band, he wears a ring engraved with a heart — an imperfect, hand-drawn heart. While he was still intubated last May, a nurse gave him a pen to write a note. He drew a heart instead. The couple transferred the image to his ring; Dr. Amundson wears a necklace with a matching engraved pendant.
Almost There Mr. Newell still has numbness in his right shin and nerve pain in his right foot but has otherwise healed. A new aortic valve will need replacing every five to 10 years. After the aortic dissection, he lost 30 pounds of muscle, which Dr. Amundson said he’s recovering.
