Nurses Help As Utah Woman Gets Married In ICU Next To Dying Father

MURRAY, Utah – Kylee Porter never could have imagined getting married without having her father by her side, but she never could have foreseen the tragedy that altered her wedding plans.

The woman said her dad, 43-year-old Michael Porter, was suddenly stricken with what was first thought to be a heart attack.

“They did an angiogram and that concluded he had a blockage in one of his arteries and they’re assuming that the blockage kind of caused his heart to go off of normal rhythm and it just stopped,” the 23-year-old daughter said. “They said they had coronary artery disease and that’s what killed him.”

Porter said her father, often considered “the go-to guy,” had always been healthy and fit, and what happened was a complete shock.

“He was very outgoing, loved the outdoors, just lit up the whole entire room that he stepped into,” Porter said. “He was just completely comfortable with being himself and he was just an all-around wonderful man. He was just amazing and just so happy and just so willing to help people.”

Porter said she had always planned on her father being there with her for her wedding to fiancé Dakota Warner, which had been set for June 18.

On Jan. 27, Michael Porter showed no brain activity and Kylee Porter said she was told by doctors that her dad was never going to wake up.

“(I) came home that day and talked with my (fiancé) and I was just like, look, my dad’s never coming back, he’s never going to wake up. I said he won’t be there at my wedding, I said he won’t be there to give me away to you,” Porter recalled. “I said it would mean the world to me if you went into the hospital with me and we got married in front of dad.”

Warner agreed and Porter contacted her father’s nurses, not knowing exactly what would come of the request given current COVID-19 protocols at Intermountain Medical Center.

“I said I need to get married with my dad there,” Porter said. “The nurse said let me make a couple of calls and see what I can do. Two hours later she called and was like, ‘We’re a go, it’s a go, let’s go.’”

That call set up a frantic four to five hours, in which her family and Intermountain Healthcare nurses scrambled to make preparations for as proper a wedding as possible.

“Are they going to bring decorations?” Janine Roberts recalled wondering.

Roberts, a Respiratory Intensive Care Unit (RICU) nurse educator, said she began searching through her office and the surrounding area for decorations that could be “wedding-centric.” She found navy and white flower decorations and a sign while coworkers used card stock to make additional flower decorations.

Kylee never could have imagined getting married without having her dad there by her side. She never could have foreseen how her wedding would unfold after tragedy struck. It’s a story you just have to see…TONIGHT on @KSL5TV at 10p #KSLTV #Utah pic.twitter.com/sp2tmkDmk1

— Andrew Adams (@AndrewAdamsKSL) February 5, 2021

A charge nurse ran down to the gift shop to find other items that would pair well with the event.

“I was lucky I was able to see them come into the room,” Roberts said in a video interview recorded by Intermountain. “It was just super touching. You know, you think of your own family and those special family memories that you make and I hope it made it special for her and her husband.”

Coworker Stacie Ireland, who helped with the decorations, said she had never seen a wedding performed in the unit.

“With the pandemic, we have strict restrictions with the visitors and so over the last few months of the pandemic, we do not interact with as many family members as we did before the pandemic,” Ireland said in a video interview. “This was a unique circumstance that we had family at the bedside for a longer period of time and we were planning this special occasion for them.”

Workers in the unit said they were grateful to be able to help Porter’s father be there with her during her ceremony.

Porter, too, was grateful.

“I was so determined to get married with my dad there and, you know, they could have shot me down and they could have said no,” Porter said. “Like especially with COVID, I just took my shot just to see what they would say and getting the phone call of ‘Yes, you’re getting married today’ — I can’t even describe how that was.”

Video of the wedding captured by Intermountain showed a resting Michael Porter in his bed next to Kylee Porter, Warner and Michael Porter’s brother, who wed the two. The hospital window revealed a mountain backdrop for the ceremony. All except Michael Porter wore masks as Warner and Kylee Porter exchanged their vows.

“It just meant the world to me that I was able to get married with my daddy there,” Porter said Thursday.

According to his daughter, Michael Porter was released from the hospital and passed away peacefully at home on Sunday.

Porter said her father was taken from this world far too soon.

“I still could have had at least 44 more years with him,” she said. “Now, it’s gone.”

She reflected Thursday afternoon on all the memories — so many captured in pictures that sat on her kitchen counter.

Porter grew particularly emotional when she read a poster board she had made that included the quote, “I love you yesterday, today, tomorrow and the next day” — words she and her dad had always exchanged.

“He never, ever wanted me to forget how much he loved me in telling me this every single day,” Porter said. “It just continued on and on and on.”

She was grateful for the ceremony that provided one last memory.

“I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way,” she said.