Wedding Moved to Hospital so Groom's Dad Could Attend After Health Scare
When most brides imagine the gown they’ll wear to exchange vows, they generally think of something white, flowy and set with little bits of shine. Bride-to-be Aaliyah’s dress was a bit different — it was flowy and billowed about her, and it sported shiny creases, but it was blue.
Her groom also wore a matching gown because the couple got married in a hospital room and they were required to wear gloves as well as the fashion-forward hospital gowns in order to include a very special family member who’d experienced a last-minute emergency.
While Aaliyah and Michael Thompson of Sunnyvale, Texas, knew they wanted to be wed, it was difficult to pin down a suitable date for the ceremony.
“We were supposed to get married in March, but we had two family members pass away and that changed everything for us,” Aaliyah told KXAS-TV. “So we completely dropped everything and canceled stuff.”
“We knew that it was really important that his dad got to be there after losing those two people. No matter where we did it. It was just really important that his dad was there.”
The groom’s father has diabetes and suffered complications that led to sepsis, necessitating immediate medical care and a rather long recovery time at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center.
Unwilling to postpone the wedding yet again or leave the important father out of the proceedings, the couple cobbled together a plan.
“I told him, if your dad has surgery, there is no way that they are going to let him out for the wedding so we talked and discussed it and that’s when we decided if he can’t leave, then we go and get married in front of him in that hospital room,” Aaliyah said.
“We immediately went to work and started making plans to be married in the hospital at that point because we knew it was really important for him to be there, and there was no way the doctors were letting him out in his condition,” she told Business Insider.
Thankfully, everyone from the pastor scheduled to perform the ceremony to the nurses at the medical center pitched in to make the Thompson wedding plan a reality.
“We were originally just going to do something really small,” Michael told KXAS. “It was going to be just us, the family and him. Then the pastor came in and she’s like, ‘Hey! I got some nurses and the doctor coming out with a diabetic friendly cake and everything.’ Yeah, it was pretty cool.”
“We postponed it a few times before so we were just dead-set on making this work out,” Michael added. “We talked to the pastor and he ok’s it. It was real stressful but we managed to make it.”
Baylor Scott & White Medical Center got in on the celebration as well, posting photos from the couple’s intimate ceremony on its Facebook page.
“When most couples dream of their wedding day, it’s usually not in a hospital room,” the hospital wrote on Facebook. “However, after Michael’s dad became sick, Michael and Aaliyah decided to bring their wedding to him. With the help of our Sunnyvale staff, the couple tied the knot in our medical center. Congrats to the new Mr. and Mrs.”
While the ceremony with Michael’s father was short and sweet, the couple was also able to make it to their long-awaited church ceremony later that day. Though the additional last-minute ceremony was stressful, it was clearly appreciated.
“He kept smiling,” Aaliyah said of her new father-in-law. “He was just really happy.”
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