A bride-to-be in Texas has died from COVID-19 — just five days after she was supposed to walk down the aisle, her family said.
Stephanie Lynn Smith, 29, had been looking forward to marrying her fiancé, Jamie Bassett, on Nov. 13 in the same field where they got engaged in Lubbock, NBC News reported.
But days before the wedding, she fell sick with what she believed was shingles, which she had come down with on an earlier occasion.
“She was stressing about the wedding,” her mother, Oralia Smith, told the outlet. “She went to see the doctor about that, and he gave her medication for that.”
But her condition continued to get worse and her fiancé brought her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia.
Smith was sent home, only to return the next day as her oxygen levels plummeted, NBC reported.
“We kissed her and told her we would see her and that she would be OK,” her mother said.
Smith spent her wedding day in the hospital, where she struggled with anxiety attacks and isolation on top of battling the virus.
On Nov. 18, Bassett and her family got a call to come to the hospital, NBC reported.
Bassett said he feared the worst, knowing the hospital only let families see gravely-ill patients.
“I was kind of dreading it and had that in the back of my mind the whole time we were driving to the hospital,” he told NBC.
His fears were confirmed when he learned she’d lost her battle with the virus, just five days after they were supposed to tie the knot.
“They told us that they’d lost her pulse four times, and they brought her back three times with CPR, and for the last one they couldn’t get her pulse back,” Bassett said.
Instead of enjoying their first weeks as newlyweds, Bassett is now left grieving his fiancee, who he describes as “someone that you don’t meet every day,”
“This is an uncommonly caring and loving person who just wants to fix the world,” he said
