Nurses plan wedding within hours to ensure bride's terminally ill mom gets to witness her special day

Sometimes people go out of the way to do things that go way beyond their call of duty for a person. Nurses at a hospital did something similar for a terminally ill mom so she could witness her daughter's wedding. The daughter was initially about to get married in the August of 2025 but she decided to do it earlier when her mom was moved to a hospice. Although the nurses had never done such a thing before, they put together a beautiful wedding, as per WATE.

The woman Samantha Barry and her husband Phillip Bastelica had decided that they would get married so that the woman's mom, Lynn, could be there. The mom had been battling a terminal illness for a long time but she was moved from a progressive care unit to a hospice sometime ago. "When we got there it was kind of a shock of what we saw with someone who was battling for over 10 years," the daughter expressed. "We decided to have a wedding that day. Not something that we definitely planned on having, but my now husband went out to Walmart and got himself a suit. I had just in case of emergency brought my mom’s wedding dress." The nurses joined in so they could make the wedding possible.

"I called dietary and I was like 'Hey we need a cake at this time.' I know my nurse manager got ahold of the gift shop, she got a hold of the marketing team, I was like we need photos. This has to be a whole wedding," Shailee Dowdy, the head nurse of the progressive care unit at UT Medical Centre told the outlet. "We even had little decorations going down the aisle, you know to give her special walking space and the cake came out beautiful. They even had little bottles and drinks for themselves down there it was really cute," Brittany McCoy, another nurse at the unit, explained.

"It’s the patient, but it’s also the family and how that patient interacts with the family, how they impact the family. When you go to nursing school, you don’t think you’ll plan a wedding, but that was really important for the patient and family that day," Kayla Daugherty, the nurse manager at the hospital pointed out. Everything was up and running in four hours and the mom got a front-row seat to her daughter's wedding. The nurses also played "Here comes the bride" on their phones as the daughter walked down the aisle with her dad.

"How special they made it by doing the things Sam said, in regards to the cake you know, making sure we brought mom downstairs, so she could witness everything. It truly did feel like, you know, when you get married you expect to have all the supporting cast around you and they went out of their way to Facetime my family," the husband recounted. "All of the nurses that helped us, we just want to personally thank them, It was so special for us," the bride expressed. It was really important for the woman to have her mom there as per the outlet's YouTube channel, and thanks to the nurses, the couple could actually make it happen.