—by Beth Stockdell, Fayetteville, Ark.

“Big Ben Roethlisberger, start of his third year.”

I’m a football geek and you never know when trivia will come in handy. The doctor laughs, but he doesn’t believe that I will be able to play my harp at a wedding on Saturday. We are having this conversation as he prepares to do an emergency appendectomy on me late Wednesday night. He is trying to tell me that only a crazy quarterback would go back to work so soon but he can’t remember which one until I give him the details.

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The wedding in question has been a challenge since the moment I booked it. It is the first time I’ve worked as a subcontractor, and I didn’t get to have my usual music meeting with the bride. Via the coordinator the couple requested three pop songs that I didn’t know. I worked hard at preparing these songs and extracting the details about this wedding. It hasn’t been a smooth road.

So it’s a week before the wedding and I’m sick, really sick, and it is days before they finally determine that it is my appendix that is failing. Luckily, I have a wonderful harp friend who is on standby for doing the wedding if I can’t make it. However, because of the uncertainty, delays, communication problems, long drive to the remote wedding location, and the specific selection of music for this wedding, I feel it would be cruel to toss it to her at the last minute. I’m determined the show must go on.

It wasn’t a hot day so I didn’t think it would be much of a problem when they asked me to sit in the sun. All I’m thinking about is getting through the next hour and I’m not comforted when the minister starts telling us how late the rehearsal started the night before. The ceremony gets off to a good start, however, as the groom and the minister start down the aisle right on time. Things quickly spiraled downward, though, as the altar at the front, festooned with glass balls, crashes to the ground and breaks just as the processional is beginning.

The rest of the ceremony goes smoothly until my iPad decides to overheat in the middle of the recessional and shut down! If I hadn’t been focused on my stomach and the music, I know I would never have agreed to sit in the sun—usually, I’m very careful about that for the sake of my harp. I handed the iPad to my husband to get it out of the sun  and continued to improvise.

I’m sure I look grim in all the photos, but surviving a wedding with a few hiccups less than three days after appendix surgery was still much easier than having to face large defensive linemen like Big Ben did three days after his appendectomy. •