Christine Jo Miller’s eyes were watering on her wedding day, but the tears weren’t because of joy.
No, the 23-year-old had a reaction to flowers she picked a day earlier for floral arrangements.
As a result, Miller’s white wedding dress contrasted with a red and bumpy rash on her face. Not that she saw it: Her eyes were swelled shut and she feared she might go blind.
“I was in so much pain,” Miller told Inside Edition. “Nobody knew what to do.”
When Miller married her college sweetheart, Jonathan, in September, she thought creating floral arrangements using flowers from her 29-acre plot of land near Lincoln, Nebraska, would be a nice touch.
One type of flower that caught Miller’s eye was snow-on-the-mountain, which is known for its lovely white blooms.
It’s also known for being poisonous, but Miller didn’t realize that until she went to wash her face the morning of her wedding, not realizing the sap residue was still on her hands from doing the floral arrangements from the night before.
She started breaking out, so much so that by 11:30 a.m., her eyes were so swollen that her mom took her to a nearby emergency clinic, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
Sadly, it was closed.
Ever the trooper, Miller put on her gown and went to the ceremony. She walked down the aisle to get hitched feeling absolutely terrible.
“I literally couldn’t see my husband when I was saying my vows because my vision went blurry,” she told HuffPost by email. “So blurry I passed out twice at my reception.”
The eye problems set off a chain reaction of other snafus.
“Due to all of this going on, and since I put my wedding dress on 20 minutes before walking down the aisle, I forgot to wear shoes at the forest wedding,” Miller said. “My veil fell out twice walking down the aisle, we forgot our rings, and our wedding song didn’t get played.”
The couple also skipped the unity portion of the ceremony because they forgot those items.
“Our pastor cut it short and married us in a hurry because of the pain I was in,” Miller said. “Literally my entire day was a mess hahaha.”
After the vows were exchanged, the Millers didn’t go to the reception. Instead, they went to the hospital to get medication for the bride.
Of course, there were troubles with that as well, thanks to insurance foul-ups because she was newly married with a new name, according to the Omaha World-Herald.
Eventually, Miller received eye drops, pain medication and a steroid shot, and arrived at the reception three-and-a-half hours late.
“Everyone had already been done eating a while and were still awkwardly sitting at the tables,” she told HuffPost. “Nobody knew if it would be good or bad to update them. We thought they deserved to know why they were sitting in the same spot for so long and I wanted my wedding to keep going even though I wasn’t there.”
When the couple did arrive, Miller was no longer in her white wedding dress, instead wearing pajama pants and a shirt Jonathan found at Target that read “Bride.”
“I didn’t wear my dress into the reception mainly because I went fully blind and had been tripping over it since I couldn’t see where I was walking,” Miller explained.
The Millers did dance at the reception, but the bride said she wasn’t able to eat, drink or be merry.
“I laid underneath my grandparents table for a large portion of the night icing my eyeballs and crying,” Miller said.
“I was the scariest-looking person at my wedding,” she told Inside Edition.
Although there is video of the actual wedding, the photographer graciously allowed the couple to retake their pictures a week later when the bride was back to normal.
This time, the bouquet was hypoallergenic, according to Inside Edition.