Rx for Love
Expectant parents Leslie Beattie and Dennis DeGeorge exchange wedding vows at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital's chapel on Saturday, April 24, 2010.
They had planned to marry in a surprise ceremony during a backyard barbeque for family and friends at their Mar Vista home on April 24. Then fate intervened.
Beattie, who’s expecting twins, began pre-term labor and was admitted to Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital for monitored bedrest. The wedding appeared to be off.
But Beattie and DeGeorge had their April 24 wedding after all, thanks to plan B – a wedding in the hospital’s chapel. Beattie and DeGeorge exchanged vows in a brief ceremony. Beattie was wheeled on a gurney for the nuptials in front of family and friends before returning to the hospital’s Antepartum Unit for high-risk pregnancies.
Beattie wore a maternity dress that served as her wedding gown and her brother, Elliott Beattie, and sister, Betsy Kortebein, flew in from Detroit and Little Rock, Ark., respectively, to walk her down the aisle and serve as her maid of honor. Beattie jokes that her wedding party’s colors were navy blue – the color of scrubs worn by her nurses!
About 20-25 guests attended the wedding. “We counted the number of chairs in the chapel and that seemed like the most it could hold,” she quips. Among the guests were her obstetrician, Dr. Khalil Tabsh, who has ordered continued bedrest for Beattie immediately following the ceremony.
“It’s not the picture I would have painted for my wedding day,” says Beattie, a freelance prop master who was working on the “Hannah Montana” television show prior to her hospitalization. “But I still feel like I’m the luckiest woman in the world.”
Beattie is expected to remain in the hospital for the rest of her pregnancy. Her actual due date is July 26.
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Fabian Lewkowicz
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