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“It wasn’t love at first sight or anything,” she says with a straight face.
Paul had been in a car wreck around Thanksgiving of 2003. He and a co-worker were coming back to La Crosse from Chaseburg, Wis., after work. Paul builds things for a general contractor. They lost control on a slick curve and rolled the truck three times. The co-worker was flung from the truck like a newspaper. So was Paul.
Only one of them needed a helicopter ride to the hospital.
Julie was a nurse at Gundersen Lutheran who came in for a weekend shift in the intensive care unit. Normally, they get to pick their patients, but a woman named Lori Fix assigned her to Paul.
“This one will be good,” she said, and Julie started wondering what she was up to.
They went over the reports and then in to meet Paul and suddenly Lori was introducing him to Julie as “single.”
Also, bed-ridden. But single, yes.
When a woman named Fix tries to set you up with someone, you better not fight it.
But Julie did fight it. She was embarrassed. She takes her job seriously.
But as Paul was going in and out of intensive care, agonizing through one surgery after another, Julie was always there. “Continuity of care” they call that, when a nurse stays with one patient.
One night, she told Paul she was going on break and to put his light on if he needed anything.
“Will you go with me?” he said.
Will you go with me? They said he didn’t have head injuries, but now she wasn’t so sure. She told the other nurses to watch him closely, he was starting to act weird.
Paul doesn’t even remember saying that, or anything about the wreck or much of his hospital stay.
“They say I didn’t hit my head,” he says, “but I don’t know.”
He didn’t remember Julie’s name after he went home and spent three weeks in a wheelchair before moving on to crutches. He only remembered she was nice, and so he wrote her a thank-you card with his phone number and asked her if she’d like to do something sometime.
She didn’t know what to say, but because Julie knew Paul’s mom from Western Wisconsin Technical College, she decided to call out of courtesy.
They had their first date on Jan. 26, 2004. On the second date, he came right out and said, “So what are you thinking?” ’cause Paul is a say-what-he’s-thinking kind of guy.
Julie wasn’t even sure if she could ethically date a former patient, but everyone told her she was worrying for nothing.
Last December, he bought a ring, and he wanted to propose on a trip to Vegas. But the more he got to thinking about it, the more he was sure all the pins in his body would set off the airport alarm and he’d have to unload his pockets right in front of her.
Then the surprise would be ruined. He couldn’t put it in his luggage because, well, you’ve seen “Meet the Parents.”
So he proposed before they left. A year later, yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, they got married at St. John’s United Church of Christ.
“It seemed like it would be romantic,” Julie says.
The strange part is, she probably wouldn’t have called if not for the fact that she knew Paul’s mother. And it was Paul’s mother who she wanted to ask if it was unethical.
She didn’t have to ask. You see, as a young man, Paul’s dad came to the hospital many years ago with a softball injury. And he pestered a nurse until she finally went on a date with him. And she married him.
You’d be surprised how often that happens.
Matt James cannot be reached. This is his last column for the Tribune.
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