That's not quite the way it played out. On their third day Totenberg and Reines, both strong swimmers, donned snorkeling gear and set out to eavesdrop on some exotic fish a quarter mile offshore. They were about 30 feet apart when Reines saw a small fishing boat speeding directly toward his bride. "Before I could scream," he says, "I heard this loud thunk and watched her go under."
He dove to find her, but she quickly bobbed to the surface. Swimming to her side, he found her face covered with blood. She had no idea that she'd been struck by the boat's propeller. "I thought I'd been hit by a wave," recalls Totenberg. "I thought, 'I've got a nosebleed.' " Then she grew dizzy, and Reines circled his arm around her and began towing her to shore. "I remember turning to look," she says, "and thinking, 'God, we've got so far to go.' "
Though outwardly calm, Reines was just as concerned. "I was worried she might bleed to death," he says. "I was dragging her in and got another 150 to 200 yards when a boat pulling kids on a tire appeared in front of us. We started screaming for help."
The boaters picked up Totenberg while Reines trailed along with the children on the tire. Once ashore he rushed her to a tiny island hospital, where he scrubbed up and supervised the doctor closing her wounds—an 8-in. gash across the back of her head and slashes 8 to 20 in. long on her left side, chest and shoulders. "That propeller sliced me like a peach," says Totenberg. "If it had gone another quarter inch, I would have been brain-injured." A trauma specialist who is chief of surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts, Reines was a rock in the OR. "I just flipped [an inner] switch and started telling them to do everything by the book," he says. Only later did he revert from hard-nosed clinician to relieved spouse. "Then my darling husband, the minute we were alone, realized I was alive and going to survive," says Totenberg. "He was in tears before I was."
After a night in the hospital she returned to their honeymoon suite to recuperate. It was days later before the fisherman, a man in his 60s, found out he'd struck her. He apologized, and Totenberg was forgiving. "Accidents happen," she says.
On Nov. 25 she and Reines flew back to Boston, and within a week Totenberg was back at work. Shuttling between homes in Boston and Washington, she and Reines—the father of two grown daughters whose first wife, Gail, died of breast cancer at 43—savor together their new life that they came so close to losing.
"David and I consider ourselves very blessed and a testament to the ability to find love again," says Totenberg, who was married for 20 years to former Colorado Sen. Floyd Haskell, who died of pneumonia at 82. "I can't call it the honeymoon from hell. I have a husband who adores me. I'm alive—I have all my limbs and whatever brains I had before."
Richard Jerome
Jane Sims Podesta in Washington, D.C.
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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