NEWS RELEASE
NIAGARA HEALTH
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The only thing Hayley Bromley was more certain of than marrying her partner, Alex, was that she wanted her father, Hugh, to walk her down the aisle.
When Hugh was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February, Hayley put the wedding planning into high gear.
The Kingston woman, originally from Niagara Falls, looked a year ahead, placing her hope in the chemotherapy Hugh would receive to control a form of cancer with a reputation for being difficult to treat.
“When he first got diagnosed, one of the things he always talked about was walking me down the aisle,” Hayley says. “I wanted to get the process moving, but thought I’d have a year to do it.”
A month later, to the day of Hugh’s diagnosis, Hayley walked down a makeshift aisle in a room in the Brock Unit at the Niagara Falls Hospital while her father, unable to walk, watched his daughter’s nuptials, which came together in less than 24-hours thanks to the help of a 10-strong team of Emergency Department and Brock Unit staff.
Together, they secured a dress and shoes, flowers, a photographer and officiant. Infection Prevention and Control also played a vital role in facilitating the ceremony.
“I couldn’t believe how much everyone cared,” Hayley recalls. “With everything I was going through, I didn’t have the capacity to (plan) it myself. They thought of everything. All I had to do was show up the next day.”
Hugh was diagnosed on Feb. 22 after chronic back and stomach pain, originally attributed to a hernia, led him to the Niagara Falls Emergency Department (ED). A mass on his pancreas was discovered during at CT scan.
Surgery wasn’t an option. Chemotherapy wouldn’t be curative but it could prolong his life, the family was told. Physicians predicted Hugh could live up to a year after diagnosis.
However, the 49-year-old didn’t respond well to the first chemotherapy treatment and found himself back at the ED a few weeks later. He was experiencing stroke-like symptoms and wasn’t eating or communicating.
His healthcare team discovered he had internal bleeding and Hugh was declared palliative with just days to live. He would be moved to a bed at Hospice Niagara as soon as possible.
Hayley immediately asked Triage Nurse Eleanora Cook for help pulling off a hospital-room wedding so she and Hugh could have that one wish of him walking her down the aisle fulfilled. Although he wasn’t able to do that, he and Hayley did share a father-daughter wedding dance.
“It was meant to be just for him,” Hayley says. “It was just for my dad.”
Cook turned to ED Charge Nurse-turned-wedding planner Lorie Heafey for assistance. Heafey didn’t hesitate taking the request to social worker Andrea DiToro, who connected with the family to learn more before going to the daily bed meeting where other team members banded together to make it happen.
“Everyone knew someone who could help with something,” Heafey says.
“I’ve worked at this site many years and I know in the past we’ve done a lot of cool things. We have families of our own and take pleasure in what we do, and helping patients and making things better in patients’ lives, it’s one small thing we can do.”
Clinical Manager Jen Law secured flowers from Mullen Garden Market and arranged for photography. DiToro was able to rent a dress and shoes for Hayley from Marilee’s Bridal in Fonthill. Personal Support Worker Miguel Romero, who knew the Bromleys personally, found an officiant. Registered Practical Nurse Evelyn Belchior provided support to Hayley throughout the process.
Karen Paschert, ED Clinical Manager, Matthew Baronaitis, Surgical Manager, and Branden Da Silva, Infection Control Practitioner, rounded out team while ED staff chipped in financial contributions to cover any costs.
“In about four hours, we were able to get all of this together,” Law says. “It was just so meaningful to see the family unite around a tragedy and to be able to support the family going through this.”
Romero was originally asked to officiate the wedding himself. Nervous about having to be ordained quickly and wanting to do his best by Hayley and her family, he mentioned his assignment to his wife that evening at dinner.
“She said, ‘That’s great but we can do better than that,’” Romero recalls.
It turns out that a few years earlier, Romero’s son, Andrew, then 15, decided on a whim to become ordained as a minister online. Hayley’s wedding would be his first ministerial effort.
“He said, ‘I want to do it,’” Romero says. “He knew the whole procedure. He got dressed up and I said, ‘Andrew, make me proud.’ He did his job wonderfully. I told him ‘You don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve made us so proud.’”
Niagara Health was proud, too -- of the entire team for their heroic effort to make Hayley’s wish happen for her dad. Earlier this summer, the group was feted with the Extraordinary Interdepartmental Collaboration Award at the annual Awards of Excellence.
The recognition feels good, Heafey says. But it wasn’t the motivation for adding wedding planning to anyone’s workload.
“It was gratifying to see (the award) happen and to know I work with such an amazing team, who I feel share the same empathy,” she says. “It’s nice to see we’re in healthcare for however many years and we’re still in it for all the things that matter, which is changing someone’s outcome or assisting with someone’s outcome. This is a memory that will stay with everyone in the family.”
So will the gratitude the Bromleys feel for the people who made it happen.
“(Hayley) said, ‘My dad is going to watch me get married. I’m going to make it happen,’” recalls Allison,
Hayley’s mom and Hugh’s wife. “Hayley is a go-getter. All she did was say the word to a nurse at the hospital and they had everything arranged. I was just blown away by the compassion of the staff.
“The people at the Niagara Falls Emergency Department were unbelievable. I have no words for how good they were to us. It’s your loved one and you want them to be taken care of, and the staff were amazing to us and our girls.”
As Hayley looks ahead to one day hosting a wedding reception, she looks back on her wedding day with mixed emotions.
“It was a sad day but it was also happy. It’s hard to articulate,” she says. “My dad got to see me in a dress and we had our dance. Everyone was so helpful and nice. If they hadn’t done what they did, that day wouldn’t have happened. You could see how much they cared.”
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