On a Wing and a Prayer‪ ‬

A trip back from Molokai, an idyllic place were it not for the specter of its notorious leper colony. Departure by plane, a single-engine aircraft, when the engine suddenly explodes, forcing an open-ocean ditching, a maneuver that is seldom successful. A crash into shark-infested Pacific waters. My wife and me, grievously injured (5 ribs, a split sternum and a massive hematoma for her, 3 ribs, a herniation, punctured eardrums and a forehead lesion for me). Scrambling for safety, for life vests that were not there, water rising in the cabin, exiting into the water with miraculously last-second finds of life vest packages that were almost impossible to open with wet hands and which could not be properly donned. Abandoning the doomed plane, soon separated by capricious currents. Floating for hours alone, awaiting shark visits ala The Indianapolis, slipping into painfully violent shivering shock with incipient hypothermia, exhaustion, involuntarily inhaling and ingesting salt water. Ultimate, crushing despair as darkness and death loomed. And that wasn’t the worst of it ...