Everyone meet Andrew. Yup that guy standing between Josh and I, looking like death slightly warmed up? His name in Andrew and he has a great reason for looking like that.
About six hours before this photo was taken he was in a different country, in hospital, recovering from surgery.
A couple of days before our wedding we'd gotten an email from him. In a nutshell it said "Sorry guys, don't think I'm going to make it. About to be rushed in surgery because of a strangulated hernia."
Um that's okay. Well it's not. It sounds horribly painful. But we forgive you. Someone dies and the funeral is the same time as our wedding? We can get past that. Ditto being rushed into emergency surgery.
And then, I'm all married and blissful and dancing down the aisle and I see ANDREW. Being type A anally retentive organizer my first thought is "Oh my gosh. I rearranged the seating plan and he's not on it anymore!!!!" Followed quickly by "Hold on. He's supposed to be in HOSPITAL!!!"
And here is what happened the previous day after his emergency surgery.
Andrew is lying in his hospital, totally bummed about missing our wedding. Due to being unconscious he'd missed his flight and so rings the airline to see if there's anyway he can get on another flight and make our wedding.
Very helpfully the airline inform him that his fare is not transferrable, regardless of reason, and so if he wants to get on another flight he has to buy a whole new ticket.
Not being flush with that kind of cash Andrew whips out his trusty laptop and, from his hospital room, sets up a twitter account and blog entitled something like "Get Andrew to NZ For Josh's Wedding" where he explains his predicament. He sends it to all his friends and asks them to pass it around hoping that somehow it will get to someone who will be able to help him.
Within two hours he's had 30,000 hits and the thing has gone semi-viral.
Within half a day it's somehow been picked up by A Current Affair and is on their website and they're ringing wanting to interview him.
A researcher from A Current Affair rings the airline and tells them that unless they want a whole lot of bad PR then they need to get Andrew on a plane and to our wedding.
By that night Andrew had tickets on new flights. I have absolutely no idea how he managed to get himself out of hospital, let alone allowed to fly, but it happened.
He got on a plane the next morning, flew Sydney-Auckland-Wellington and arrived at the church as Josh and I were saying our vows. The guy was sick as could be, was in terrible pain and could barely stand, plus his trusty laptop saved our behinds at the reception with the music when the responsible person forgot theirs.
I have no idea how he did it. While he was busy twittering away to the hordes, I would have been busy lying in my hospital bed composing a very bitter letter of complaint to the airline and not going anywhere!
3 comments:
That's amazing! Awesome story.
Is he single? He's cute and sounds like an amazing guy!
Last time I checked he was a single as ummm trying to come up with something that's really single. A skunk raising its tail?
Post a Comment