Rising Above the Wave: Surviving Tsunami and Stroke in Japan 2011

“On March 10, 2011, Walt and Ellie Christie boarded a plane in Los Angeles for a life-changing trip to Bhutan. As they flew over the Pacific, the plane crossed over a huge tsunami generated by Japan’s Tohoku earthquake. At about this time, Walt suffered a stroke and was left paralyzed and unable to speak. When the plane made an emergency landing in Osaka, Japan, to let them off, Ellie was left with an impaired husband in a country in disaster where she found no one who spoke English. This is the story of Ellie’s state of mind, their eventual medical evacuation, Walt’s recovery, and the way the world changed for both of them.

Walt and Ellie Christie met in 1982 when he was giving a lecture on the evolution of consciousness. Walt was a psychiatrist based in a hospital where Ellie was teaching mind-body medicine to family medicine residents. Ellie first traveled to Nepal and Tibet in 1988, a few months before they were married. In 1995, they made a trip to India and Nepal and another one to Dharamsala, India, to take the first course in English at Men-Tsee- Khang, the Dalai Lama’s medical school.” —From the author

Walt Christie, born to an Aroostook potato family, practiced psychiatry for many years at the Maine Medical Center. He always wanted to write, and in 1988 he obtained an MFA in writing from Vermont College. Psychiatry proved to be too time consuming for novel-length works, but in retirement he completed a historical novel about Native Americans who lived in his part of Maine about 1600 and then went on to write a memoir of his and his wife’s ill-fated trip to Bhutan.