The final writing of my book on Icelandic seawomen took a strange turn almost a year and a half ago, when I noticed I was uncharacteristically getting short of breath while riding my bike uphill on my daily commute home. On New Year’s Eve, 2014, at the insistence of friends, I went to the emergency room to get it checked out. The next thing I knew, I was being whisked to another hospital in an ambulance, and being given blood transfusions.