Christine Jo Miller, from Nebraska, had thought it would be a nice touch if she created floral arrangements using flowers from her own plot of land on her September wedding day.
Little did she know that the beautiful blooms she picked for her marriage to soulmate Jonathan, was snow-on-the-mountain – which is poisonous.
It was something Christine continued to be unaware of - until she washed her face on the morning of her wedding – without a clue that the sap was still on her hands.
By 11.30am the bride’s eyes were so swollen she went to a nearby emergency clinic – only to find it closed.
Determined to get hitched, Christine put on her white gown and went to the ceremony.
A photo shows her in a car on the big day – with two tissues stuffed up her nose.
‘My eyes burned so bad to open them and my vision was so blurry I could only see two feet in front of me,’ Christine said later.
‘But I had sisters who stopped mid day to pray over me and a brother reminding me and hugging me every five seconds of the crazy stories we will have to tell our future kids and I'm so much more honored that these are my people than I ever was before.’
While Christine made it down the aisle, the pastor cut the ceremony short because of the pain she was in.
And after the vows, instead of going to the reception – the newlyweds went to hospital.
After eye drops, pain medication and an injection, they got to the reception three hours late.
‘I laid underneath my grandparents table for a large portion of the night icing my eyeballs and crying,’ the bride said.
‘I was the scariest-looking person at my wedding,’ she told Inside Edition.
But in a heartwarming conclusion to the story, the wedding photographer offered to reshoot the photos a week later, once Christine had recovered.
‘Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart again Jenny Wiese and Nikki McLeay for all you did to make my wedding so memorable,’ the bride wrote on Facebook.
‘And thank you so much to everyone who celebrated this crazy day with us, we are so blessed!
'Huge thank you to my cousins, aunts, girlfriends, siblings, and parents who kept my reception going just the way i would have wanted and updating me with pictures and videos during our visit at the ER.’
This article originally appeared on New Idea.
