Loren Dunham and DeeAnne Helfritz had planned an idyllic two weeks on the big island of Hawaii, but a snorkeling accident derailed their vacation.

“It was just a winter vacation,” Helfritz said. “It was the last state that Loren had on his list. He’s been in all 50 states now. We were having a wonderful vacation, a lovely time.”

The Fairmont couple arrived in Hawaii on Feb. 13. Loren wanted to take a helicopter ride over volcanoes, which he did, and they planned on visiting Volcanoes National Park. The third thing on their list was snorkeling, a tropical activity that neither had tried.

On Saturday, Feb. 24, with three days left on their vacation, the couple joined a charter trip for a snorkeling excursion. They were outfitted with the appropriate gear, and then Dunham jumped in the water, with Helfritz following close behind.

“Loren doesn’t remember the day at all,” Helfritz said. “I was looking down in the water to see what I could see. After a while, I was wondering if Loren was seeing the same thing I was seeing. I looked up at the group, and I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

After scanning the group several times, something prompted Helfritz to look in the opposite direction, where she saw her husband floating in the water.

“Something didn’t look right,” she said. “I swam over to him and realized that his head was underwater.”

Helfritz signaled the boat and trained crew members jumped into the water and swam to the couple. Helfritz was struggling to pull Loren up from the water.

“I looked at him and thought, this is not good. This is not good at all,” she said.

The rescuers pulled Dunham to the boat and got him on board.

“Loren is a big man,” Helfritz said. “They really struggled to get him into the boat. It took a lot of men to get him up there.”

Two of the people on the excursion were nurses who quickly joined the crew in performing CPR on Dunham.

“We have no idea how long he was underwater, but we know that he was clinically dead when he was pulled out of the water,” Helfritz said.

After seven minutes of resuscitation efforts, Dunham registered a pulse. He was loaded onto a board attached to a personal watercraft that had been summoned, taken to shore and transferred to a helicopter for transport to the hospital in Waimea. The nurses assured Helfritz that the medical facility was top-notch and the best place for Dunham to go.

Because there was no room for her on the personal watercraft, Helfritz had to wait about 30 minutes until the excursion boat docked, and then “an incredibly wonderful person” drove her to the hospital about 30 miles away. When she arrived, Dunham was still being treated in the emergency room. He was put on a ventilator and transferred to the intensive care unit.

At the hospital, Helfritz was given contact information for the Visitor Aloha Society, a non-profit group serving Hawaii’s visitors experiencing crisis. The group arranged transportation for Helfritz to get back to her hotel and the couple’s rental car, and also gave her a basket with comfort items such as toiletries and a blanket.

When Dunham’s two sons, who live in Rochester and Minnetonka, learned of the incident, they immediately went online and found Helfritz alternative lodging because the couple’s vacation housing reservation ended Feb. 27, three days after the accident.

“I had to check myself out of where we were staying and find a new place, but everything was booked,” Helfritz said. “His sons went on the Internet and found me a place to stay so I would be close by. Otherwise, I was 30 miles away, but 30 miles was too far.”

Four days after the accident, Dunham was removed from the ventilator. Hospital staff asked the usual questions: his name, what year it was, the name of the president.

“He stumbled a little bit at first,” Helfritz said. “He thought that Bush was president. Then they asked him the same questions later on in the day. His eyes were closed, and his voice was very weak at the time.”

His response to who was president? “Donald Trump. Good Lord!”

“I got my geography mixed up too,” Dunham said. “Don’t tell me I don’t know where Hawaii is, but I had it in my head that where all this was happening was somewhere in southwestern Wisconsin.”

As Dunham continued to regain his strength, he developed blood clots in his lungs. His chest was sore from the CPR, and his shoulders were sore from rescuers trying to pull him out of the water and into the boat. Helfritz would spend every day and every evening at the hospital with her husband before returning to her hotel.

“I would leave him and go back to my room. Then I just kind of fell apart,” she said. “But I knew I had to do things. I knew there was nobody else.”

“I can’t overstate just how much DeeAnne had to go through,” Dunham said. “I can’t imagine going home from the hospital and then sitting down at the computer and trying to figure out what to do about tomorrow.”

Dunham, 72, taught for 40 years, and he still maintains contact with many of his students and their families, as well as being involved in Fairmont community organizations such as Dollars for Scholars and their church, Grace Lutheran.

“One day one of the people who works in the hospital office in Waimea handed me this stack of e-cards (electronic greeting cards),” Helfritz said. “She said she wanted to see who was getting all these cards. She thought something was wrong with her machine because it just kept spitting out cards. Another day, the same thing happened with another lady. She said they usually only get one or two e-cards a week.”

The couple has been overwhelmed by the amount of support they have received. From prayers, to food, to offers of help, the contact from friends helped them to cope.

“I couldn’t keep up with the number of phone calls and emails from people,” she said. “When I’d go back to my room, I would try to keep up, but it was almost impossible with all the messages.”

A friend set up a Caring Bridge page online so people could stay current on Dunham’s condition. Members of Grace Lutheran Church have offered to help, and, after much reluctance, the couple finally agreed, as the hospital stay stretched on, to the establishment of an account at US Bank for donations.

When Dunham was strong enough to travel, arrangements were made through On Call International, a company that supplies medical personnel to accompany patients on trips.

“Never, never go anywhere without trip insurance,” Dunham said. “That’s what saved us.”

As a result of paying about $350 for trip insurance, On Call International covered the medical part of Dunham’s travel back to Fairmont, providing a car and driver to the airport in Hawaii, a skilled nurse to travel with him, and a car and driver from the Minneapolis airport to the Fairmont hospital. Insurance paid for two first class tickets that were used by the patient and his nurse because the extra room was needed for medical equipment such as the oxygen tank. Helfritz had to pay for her own ticket home.

“That was minimal for what it cost to get him back here because I couldn’t have gotten him back on my own,” she said.

“We had a 24-hour trip home, and he had everything under control. He was highly skilled,” said Dunham, praising his nurse.

However, he wasn’t too happy with the driver from Minneapolis to Fairmont.

“Loren wanted to stop at Perkins in every town, and he was very angry with the driver because he wouldn’t stop,” Helfritz said. “We were telling Dr. (Abraham) Joseph about that when we got here to the Fairmont hospital. We got back on Friday, March 16. The next day, Dr. Joseph’s son, Tony, who Loren had for Junior Achievement, came to visit and guess what he bought.”

“Pancakes from Perkins,'” Dunham said with a grin. “That was nice.”

Dunham has been undergoing therapy at Mayo Clinic Health System in Fairmont, where he remains a patient, but he is optimistic that he will be discharged soon.

“I’m ready to transition back into our home,” he said. “We have to have our home assessed in terms of what I can and can’t do.”

Helfritz said the bedrooms and bathroom of their 100-year-old home are all upstairs so Dunham has to be able to maneuver the steps.

“He has to be able to do things on his own,” she said. “He has to be able to walk through the house, get up and down the stairs, but he’s doing really well. He’s already come so far.”

Returning to their home will require some assistance, and Helfritz is ready to “call in the chips” of all the people who offered help when they were in Hawaii.

“They meant it. They will be here to help,” she said.

“It’s all going to work out,” Dunham said.

The cause of the snorkeling accident remains a mystery, but Helfritz has a theory.

“They ruled out a heart attack, but my own feeling is that Loren dipped his head too far, ingested water, got panicky and then ingested more water,” she said. “That’s all I can think of. We don’t know, but I know we won’t try snorkeling again.”

People wanting to contact the couple may email them at dunfritz@midco.net