The Wedding Day
23.10.15, 3:55 pm

Pre wedding:

The pre-wedding part was actually a pretty miserable time for me, and not at all how I envisioned. I did two days of work and was then off from the Wednesday. James’s parents turned up Wednesday afternoon, then his sister and her boyfriend on the Thursday, and then Mel on the Friday. There was a lot of last-minute arts & crafts, like tying bows around bags of biscuits and making Orders of Service. James started waking up at 5am from about Wednesday, which always woke me up, so we became more and more sleep deprived. First thing in the morning I would cycle for 40 minutes and then lift weights for 15 minutes, and at that point I’d feel calm and awesome. And then as the day wore on my stomach would burn and my heart would start skipping beats, and I’d feel more and more awful. Sometimes I’d sneak away in the afternoon and just lie on my back on my bed – I think James’s family thought I just ‘needed a moment’ to come to term with the impending wedding, but in honesty I needed the time to stop myself from freaking out because my body was turning on me.

Mel turned up on Friday like a gift from God, because she was someone I could honestly tell how I was feeling. We all went to the venue and helped set up the room, and it was actually pretty exciting and I was feeling OK. And then Mel and I went home, to get ready for the big meal that night, and I began to feel more and more awful. Just uncontrollable heart problems; a palpitating mess that made me think I was going to have an arrhythmia at any minute. All I wanted to do was stay at home and fix myself, but instead we got ready and then took a taxi to the Leopold Hotel. Gradually all the family and friends (like, 25 of them) arrived and we had drinks and made small talk. At one point my heart did a throbbing, fluttering thing so unnerving I had to force myself not to bolt from the room. It was just awful.

We had the meal, which was really nice, and I felt better for a bit, and then after making tortuous small talk with Uncle Gordon Mel and I were allowed to leave. We got home, washed my hair and tried to blow-dry the parting out of it (uber fail), and James and I sent final soppy goodnight texts to each other (no contact, including texting, after midnight!). Bed time.

Wedding day:

I had one hour’s sleep in the end, I think, at about 3am. I lay there from 11pm to 3am feeling terrible, with my heart going insane and my stomach eating itself. I knew my stomach was causing my extra heartbeat, and that the stress of that was then feeding both my stomach and my anxiety levels, but I was powerless to stop it. Beta blockers just weren’t working. At the meal Mel and I had had the brainwave of trying her omeprazole, to see if it helped my stomach, and so I wandered in to her room at 2am to wake her up and beg some pills. I took one and it was a little better. I then sat on the side of my bed and fretted about the coming day, wondering how I was going to cope. I could’ve cried, but I forced myself not to. At one point, I had the thought of ‘It’s OK, you just need to get through the next 24 hours… just slog through and then it’ll all be over’. I felt so incredibly sad, because I had been looking forward to my wedding day for over a year, and now that it was here all I could think about was getting it over and done with. And then – I’ll never tell anyone this, but writing it here is OK – for the first time in about 10 years, I wished for my mother.

At 6am I got up and had a shower, and then forced down some yoghurt. I texted my wonderful friend Emily, who’s a doctor, and she advised me on other pills to try, and said she’d go to the pharmacy for me and get them. Mel made me a cup of tea at 7.30, and we talked. She made me take double omeprazole and a beat blocker. We painted our nails, and then the hairdresser turned up insanely early. She curled and yanked my hair around for nearly 2 hours, and it was really boring, but I noticed that the pills were working and that I didn’t feel as if I was about to drop dead at any moment.
My sister and her boyfriend, Ryan, turned up, sat in my front room and proceeded to flick through a load of old photo albums and laugh at all of my outfits. I could hear them hooting away through the wall. Finally, FINALLY, the hair was done and Mel took my place, and I went off to eat more yoghurt. Ryan was wonderful and went off to buy me milk to drink. I sat on the back door step and just enjoyed the sunshine. The weather was awesome for the entire day.
The flowers arrived, and had turned out brilliantly despite us having no frickin’ clue what we were doing. Mel was released and we sat upstairs doing my makeup, at which point the wonderful photographer arrived. She came up and watched us for a bit, and then took some photos of Mel poking me in the eye with the mascara. Dad and Amanda arrived and then everything went a bit mad, with them starting to make lunch, my sister having her hair done and me drifting about shovelling yoghurt down my throat because I couldn’t manage anything else.

I decided I wanted to get into my dress early, because I knew the corset would make me extra heart-attackish and the extra time would let the dress breathe. So I hauled it on, and bellowed at the bridesmaids to get ready too, and suddenly it was a huge flurry of activity and photo posing. I’d finally sorted my medication, and it seemed to be doing the trick, and suddenly I was enjoying the day. The car came – a beautiful white Daimler V4 with blue ribbons – and suddenly just me and Dad were left with nothing to do. So we sat and watched Derby vs West Brom on Sky Sports, in full wedding gear, and waited for the car to come. It was the longest 25 minutes I’ve ever experienced.

Car came and was awesome, apart from it stank of petrol and the engine cut out in the middle of a roundabout! We drove past the balcony of the venue and I saw some of my work friends stood there chatting, and suddenly everything became more real. My bridesmaids met me at the entrance, and then we had to hide in a side room for ten minutes as my grandma had insisted on walking from the car and was taking forever to go 500 yards. Eventually everything seemed great, and they whisked the doors open, and then we all noticed that my bloody grandmother was now parked in the middle of the aisle chatting to someone rather than taking her seat. So I dived sideways, and we closed the doors and peered through a crack in the blinds until she finally sat down, and then we started again (grandma later on: ‘I timed it all beautifully – I sat down and then you arrived… you couldn’t have timed it better if you’d planned it!’).

Walking down the aisle was awesome, with the string quartet playing and everyone you knew and loved beaming at you. I did great until I caught sight of James at the front, and then I almost broke down but I managed to suck it back and carry on smiling. James looked like he was about to blub at any second too, but he did brilliantly. We sat, and then the ceremony started and it all went fantastically – everyone boomed along to the choruses of the songs, even if the verses started a little stickily, and the readings were fine, and the rings went on OK. I think I might’ve repeated one of the vows wrong, because I was enjoying the moment so much I forgot to concentrate on what was going on, and then we were kissing and everyone was clapping. We walked back down the aisle to the Ski Sunday theme tune and it was all over, and my heart had been no trouble at all, and everything had just come together at the end and become perfect.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur: we greeted everyone at the door and received approx. 800 hugs, went back in to do the legal bit, had photos outside by the roses, got locked out of the main doors for 15 minutes by accident, came back in and then had the wedding breakfast. At this point the heart was a bit of a dick but not unbearable, so I just didn’t eat much and spent the gaps on my feet, as it turns out that sitting down in a corset dress is an exquisite torture. The speeches went well – my dad’s turned out fine, apart from a bit at the end where he talked about my mum and said things that were a bit close to the bone, but it was all good. And then just lots of chat and dancing, and eating cheese and biscuits, and a hideous first dance, and then later a lovely dance where everyone made a circle around us and the swing band played New York, New York, and then slowly people went home until it was just my uni friends and James’s work friends on the dance floor, and we did crazy drunk dancing like we used to when we were 21.

Finally, it was all over. We walked back to the hotel, got up to our room, and then I got to take the dress off and breathe properly for the first time in about 12 hours and it was AMAZING. I then spent 15 minutes taking all of the hairpins out of my hair, by which point James had half fallen asleep, and then we cuddled and then it was done, and we were married.

Day after:

The hotel room was BOILING hot all night, so I woke up at 7am with an excruciating headache despite having not drank anything throughout the entire wedding bar my toasting champagne. We went downstairs for breakfast, and I decided that I needed a big friend breakfast to sort me out. Ate it, realised my mistake after about 8 minutes, went back up to my room and promptly vomited it all up. I went back to bed for an hour and woke up feeling much, much better. Went down again, sat and told everyone I knew that I’d just been hugely sick because I have no share boundaries, and my friend Emily, channelling her own wedding experience, said, ‘Don’t worry, all the best brides throw up the next day!’ Which made me feel better.

We went over to the venue and did boring clearing up, then went back to our house with James’s family, said goodbye and sent them off, and then went off ourselves down to Worcester, to spend a couple of days just sleeping, eating and walking. My stomach and heart issues had miraculously gone as soon as I’d woken up on the next day – the whole thing had just been stress. It was so weird, because the whole time I hadn’t FELT that stressed, but obviously subconsciously I was massively. And it almost ruined the whole thing, but wonderful friends and wonderful prescription medication saved the day, as they so often do.

So yeah, that was the wedding. Everyone’s always all, ‘So, anything go wrong at all?’, and I can’t ever say, ‘Well yes actually, I nearly had a total breakdown at 2am in the morning and thought I was going to die’ because it makes me sound like a lunatic, but yeah, it does add a bit of a story arc to the day. It was honestly the most incredible day of my life, so full of love and joy and happiness, and I would redo it a 1000 times if I could. I’d just definitely sort my pill schedule out earlier next time.

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