CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) —This last Christmas looked very different for one Chicago couple, who held an impromptu wedding at Rush University Medical Center.
Chicago couple Shane Gerdes and Darien Monk got engaged over the summer, but there lives were turned upside down last month.
“I seized up, and couldn’t remember it, and ended up at Rush,” Gerdes tells WBBM Newsradio’s Rachel Pierson.
On Dec. 11, doctors found a tumor on his brain and told him it needed to be surgically removed — immediately.
Shane realized he had no time to waste. Less than 48 hours after his diagnosis, he hatched a plan for an impromptu wedding.
“Sunday morning, I was asleep and he called and said, ‘Do you wanna come down here and get married?’” Darien recalls. “I was like, ‘Sure!’”
Doctors and nurses from Rush provided cake and flowers, and one nurse even called in her ordained husband to officiate the ceremony.
Instead of friends and family, they were surrounded by doctors and nurses in the very unit where Shane would receive his operation.
“They said it was the happiest thing they’d seen in a really long time,” Darien says.
Shane is now recovering from a successful brain surgery. The couple plans eventually to hold a reception with family and friends.
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