There are few days more special in a person’s life than his or her wedding day — and a big part of what makes it so important is being surrounded by those you love.
For Montana bride Hailey Carvey, having her “papa” at her wedding was a non-negotiable. A father figure to her, Carvey knew she wanted Jose Guzman to walk her down the aisle, according to KECI-TV.
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After months of planning the wedding, slated for May of this year, she and her fiancé Ethan received news of a tragic hitch in their plans: Her papa’s cancer spread from his prostate into his liver and spine and the chemotherapy used to treat it was no longer working.
Carvey, though, was resolute. Guzman would be in the wedding.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t have him there,” she told the local news station through tears. “I would’ve just walked myself with his hat. It just, like, broke me, and I was thinking in my head, ‘He has to get out of here, because he has to be there.'”
Thankfully, there are good Samaritans at Logan Health Medical Center in Kalispell, where her papa is a patient.
With the help of staff members at the medical center, Carvey and her fiancé rushed the wedding up to the end of March. In a mere 18 hours, they were able to plan every part of the wedding — from scheduling a minister to officiate to having a wedding cake after the ceremony — and held it in Guzman’s room in the ICU.
Logan Health Chaplain Tracia Deal served as the officiant, the hospital’s Health Nutrition Services Department made the wedding cake, and members of the Volunteers Department decorated the ICU for the ceremony.
“We wanted to make sure that whatever we could do on our end, to have some happiness in in this sad time of their life; we wanted to provide that for them,” Logan Health Chaplain Tracia Deal told KECI-TV.
With her papa by her side — and a small gathering of family and friends gathered in the ICU — Carvey and her now-husband were married in an intimate and certainly unique ceremony.
As the KECI-TV anchor stated, the “kindness of strangers left the newlyweds with memories they’ll never forget.”
You can watch some of their wedding in the video below:
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