‘I WOULD MARRY YOU RIGHT NOW’
Wedding bells at Presby as patient, fiancee marry in hospital lounge
There was wedding cake, there was Champagne, there was Pachelbel’s Canon in D, there were flowers in the bride’s favorite color.
There was a pulse oximeter glowing red near the ring finger, there were vending machines hidden under hospital blankets, there was an aisle wide enough for a wheelchair, there were nurse recognition forms sharing a table with a bruschetta appetizer.
There was a wedding in the family lounge of the intensive care unit of UPMC Presby on Friday morning.
“It worked out perfect,” said the bride, Amy Harvey Shilling, of Erie.
In late September, 48-year-old Matt Shilling, of Erie, found himself short of breath while walking around the Cleveland Zoo. While he does have asthma, it usually only acts up in the cold. A doctor diagnosed him with bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics, but he didn’t get any better.
Last week, he again sought medical care, going to UPMC Hamot near his house. Doctors there did an ultrasound of his heart and found him in such severe heart failure that he immediately required a ventricular assist device — essentially, an artificial heart. Two days later, with talk of a possible heart transplant, he was flown to UPMC Presby.
“When Matt came here, he was extremely sick,” Presby cardiothoracic critical care physician Raj Padmanabhan said. “He was urgently evaluated.”
With Mr. Shilling at the hospital was Amy Harvey, 44, his longtime
fiancee. The couple first met decades ago, when she was in eighth grade and he was a junior in high school. They dated for about a year when they were both in high school, went in different directions and then reconnected seven years ago, through Facebook.
About five years ago, Mr. Shilling proposed, presenting her with a ring one evening at his old house. She accepted, and they went so far as to get a marriage license, but “life got in the way” and they never went through with the wedding.
As Mr. Shilling was critically ill earlier this week, with doctors running test after test to find the cause of his health failure, “he was feeling really down,” Ms. Shilling said. “He couldn’t work, he was struggling with his health, and that started the conversation.”
Seeking to cheer him up and reassure him, “I said, ‘I would marry you right now. I would marry you here,’” Ms. Shilling said. “We started talking about that. The social workers said, ‘We can make that happen.’”
But throwing a spur-of-themoment wedding in a hospital wasn’t actually that simple. For one thing, Mr. Shilling was in no condition to travel Downtown to apply for a marriage license. And for another, they needed someone licensed to marry them.
On Thursday, things started falling into place. At about 2 p.m., a judge issued an emergency order for a marriage license; a representative from the court visited the hospital later that afternoon to issue it. Hospital staff figured out that a physician on the critical care unit happened to be ordained to perform weddings. And then, even better, after a late-night call to Erie, the couple’s pastor said he would come down for the wedding.
Hospital staff remembered one other wedding there in the last 15 years or so, but it was a healthy couple getting married at a dying patient’s bedside. They did not recall another patient’s wedding.
Preparations started in full Thursday night. Wendy O’Donnell, director of communications for the department of critical care medicine, traveled to two grocery stores looking for purple flowers, Ms. Shilling’s favorite color, and bought white and purple balloons, and a helium tank to fill them, from a Michaels craft store.
Ms. Shilling drove back to Erie, found a white dress at Kohl’s and told her 10-yearold son, Connor, that he would be missing a day of fourth grade Friday to be a ring bearer. By the time she called her sister to officially invite her to the wedding, it was almost 9 p.m.
Meanwhile, doctors had started to zero in on what might be making Mr. Shilling sick. Using an MRI and other tests, they ruled out a virus or coronary artery disease as the cause. What they did find was an abnormal heart rhythm, specifically atrial fibrillation.
“The phenomenon is called tachycardia induced cardiomyopathy,” Dr. Padmanabhan said. “A lot of the time, it goes undetected. It’s a gradual cough or shortness of breath or swelling of the legs, and people think it’s not that big of a deal.”
Left unchecked, as Mr. Shilling’s was for as long as a month, atrial fibrillation can tire out the heart muscle.
“The good thing about that is that if you can restore normal rhythm to the heart, there’s a good chance that the heart function can improve,” Dr. Padmanabhan said. “If for some reason his heart isn’t recoverable and doesn’t improve, we will be proceeding with heart transplantation as a potential therapeutic option.”
Mr. Shilling is fortunate that he is otherwise in good health, Dr. Padmanabhan said. Just over a month ago, he was regularly biking and kayaking on Presque Isle, near his house.
Doctors scheduled an electrophysiology study procedure for Mr. Shilling at 1 p.m. Friday, hoping to restore his heart to a normal rhythm. The wedding, originally scheduled for 1:30 p.m., was moved up to 11 a.m.
For the wedding, a portable speaker played John Legend’s “All of Me” as hospital staff wheeled in Mr. Shilling.
“The very first miracle that ever happened was when Jesus was invited to a wedding in the kingdom of Galilee and the caterer ran out of wine,” Colby Atkins, pastor of the Elevate church in Erie, said to begin the ceremony. “He had some guys fill them up with water, and it was there that Jesus turned water into wine to keep the celebration going.”
Ms. Shilling crouched down to be eye-level with Mr. Shilling in his wheelchair, and Connor presented her the ring from five years ago, which still fit perfectly. Because Mr. Shilling was fasting for his heart procedure, he couldn’t have any cake, but Ms. Shilling joked that she might smash some in his face afterwards.
“Although this isn’t ideal,” Mr. Shilling said, “it couldn’t have been any better.”