It was 3:30 a.m. July 24, and the medivac helicopter had restarted its engine in preparation for another lifesaving mission. My eldest daughter, Meghan, and I stood transfixed in the predawn hours staring at the roof of Memorial Hospital of Carbondale from the parking lot below.

The "whoomp-whoomp-whoomp" sound of the idling copter soon changed into the drone of a machine ready for lift-off. Slowly it rose from its pad, hesitated momentarily and then banked off into the early morning sky.

Its destination: Saint Louis University Hospital. Its patient: Meghan's mother and my wife of nearly 39 years, Susan.

As the twinkling light of the helicopter quickly disappeared, Meghan and I stood stunned, trying to grasp what had just happened. The handful of words spoken an hour or so earlier by the emergency room doctor still echoed through our heads. "Susan has had a cerebral hemorrhage. She has to go! We must get her to St. Louis!" I quickly placed the immediate decision-making challenges into the hands of the medical team � and God.

We drove in disbelief to my home to pack for the two-hour trip to St. Louis and to break the heartbreaking news to the other children: Sarah in Makanda and Matthew in Nashville, Tenn. It was shortly after 4 a.m. when I looked into Meghan's blue-grey eyes and asked, "Before I call your brother and sister and change their lives forever, tell me - did this really happen?"

In a steady, affirming voice, her answer was short and to the point: "Yes, Dad. It really did happen."

I called the other children to deliver the news that their mother was facing a life-and-death struggle and we all must give her and each other the strength necessary to get us all through this family crisis. Meghan, Matthew and Sarah soon proved not only to be our loving children but also our best friends.

For the next nine days, Susan fought for survival in the Intensive Care Unit of Saint Louis University Hospital. During that time, the children and I were given a crash course on what can go terribly wrong in the regions of our brain and the dire consequences. We now know what an angiogram is as well as the difference between a CT angio and a CT angio with profusion.

We learned that, if given a choice, we would choose an intraventricular hemorrhage rather than a devastating aneurysm or an arterio-venus malformation. Susan's first angiogram revealed the "good news" that she'd had the least damaging.

Eleven days after her helicopter ride to St. Louis, Susan came back home to Carbondale. No one knows why the hemorrhage occurred, as she had no risk factors. It looks like she will make a full recovery; however, that will take months of patience and determination.

During one of the darkest days of this ordeal, I stopped to have a beer at Riley's Pub near Grand and Arsenal after I left the hospital. Just outside the pub, I noticed a young couple searching for something under a street light. When I offered to help, the young woman spotted my SIU shirt. She beamed a smile and told me she and her husband were SIU graduates named Lee and Jeff Harris.

Jeff had dropped his St. Christopher medal in the darkness and was determined to find it. As we all searched, his wife asked what I was doing in St. Louis. I choked back tears as I told her of Susan's struggle for survival.

Moments later, Jeff found his lucky medal, then quietly walked over to me and extended his hand. In it was the medal.

"Here, take this to your wife - and good luck," he said, placing it in my palm.

Meeting these two kindred spirits from SIU was comforting, and before long, Susan's road to recovery and return home would become a reality.

I'm convinced St. Christopher is a Saluki, too.

Mike Murray, M.S. 1981, Ph.D. 1993, is a life member of the SIU Alumni Association. He recently retired from the SIU Foundation. This essay was first published in "Southern Alumni," the magazine of the SIU Alumni Association.