Hope in the Happily Ever After
Fairy godmothers do not come any more motivational than newly crowned The Daily Mail Inspirational Woman of the Year Naomi Thomas, Wedding UK discovers.
This is a story of life and death, woven together with weddings and wishes. But before you arm yourself with a box of tissues, you should really meet businesswoman, wedding planner and Wedding Wishing Well founder Naomi; sassy, savvy, sensational – and living with terminal cancer.
Naomi works tirelessly. The Wedding Wishing Well is a foundation, arranging some spectacular weddings, often within days, for people living with a terminal illness. Craving a castle? It’s yours. A horse drawn carriage? Easy. That gown that melts your heart? Consider it done. With the support of suppliers, Naomi can pluck wedding worries out of a couple’s hands, and allow them the financial and emotional breathing space to enjoy their life together.
Compassion and courage were the catalyst for this fairytale foundation to spring from a frightening finality, and a host of unique brides and grooms have one woman to thank for their piece of positivity and belief in the possible. Hope is a beautiful thing, and it is served by the bucket load at the Wedding Wishing Well.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and I was twenty six at the time,” explains Naomi. “It came as, obviously, quite a shock. There was no history in my family, so I didn’t really have any knowledge of it. I had never come across breast cancer, no one I knew had had it. I decided to head on, get on with it and start fighting it.
“The cancer I had at that point was pretty low risk, but just because I was young, they wanted to give me chemo, radiotherapy and an operation to remove the lump.”
Naomi’s bravery battled the illness until all that remained was a recommendation to undergo hormone therapy, which is where she drew the line to preserve her chances of starting a family in the near future with partner Graham, an ambition so dear to her.
“Graham and I had only been together a couple of months before my diagnosis,” says Naomi. “He had asked me to marry him just three days before. We wanted to get married that year, in the April of 2009, but we couldn’t because of the financial restraints cancer puts on a family.”
The bitter irony of beginning a life with your loved one and trying to marry swiftly in the face of such a destructive force as cancer is that funding suddenly becomes a barrier you cannot break.
“You know, I had been working, I had a very good job as a wedding planner,” Naomi says. “But with the treatment I couldn’t continue to work. I got very sick and Graham gave up his work as well. It was just really tough.”
The silver lining came bundled in a pregnancy defying all expectations.
“In the first month of trying, I fell pregnant,” beams Naomi. “It was fantastic, but scary because I had literally only just finished treatment and I was really concerned that something would harm the baby. Chemo flowing around your body at the best of times is obviously poisoning you, let alone when you’re having a baby. It doesn’t just leave your body straight away.”
At first, Naomi’s pregnancy developed smoothly, but five months later, clouds began to drift back in.
“I started to struggle with quite bad back pain,” she remembers. “It got worse and worse and worse. I was on crutches and then a wheelchair, I could barely move. They put it down to pregnancy, but I wasn’t so sure.
“The pain got to the point where I really didn’t care if I lived or died, to be honest.”
Naomi’s crippling pain soon began to dominate her life, but, amid the trauma, Naomi’s little son, Devon, was born. For a long suffering new mother, he was a little miraculous slice of perfection, rewarding her for her “year of hell” which was showing no signs of waning.
“Six days after he was born, my back was not any better,” Naomi says. “I had gone to have a lie down and when I stood up to go back downstairs my back and right leg started to spasm, and it was even worse than the pain that I had been having.
“Graham called for the doctor and we waited an hour. He then called to say he was stuck in an emergency and couldn’t get away, so we called for an ambulance.
“We waited at least another hour for the ambulance to come and when they arrived, they gave me morphine which didn’t touch it at all. They made the decision to call the fire brigade to try and get me out. It was so traumatic, the baby was crying, my now husband was crying, I was crying, it was horrible.”
The next day, in hospital, a normally jovial student nurse, with a habit of greeting Naomi with a ‘Y’alright treacle?”, took her temperature and slipped out of the room silently. In his place, doctors and nurses came sweeping in to scan her, spurred on by a stratospheric temperature. The mystery surrounding Naomi’s agony was unveiled: her spine housed a terminally cancerous tumour the size of an egg and her back was broken in three places. Her spirit, however, remained unbroken.
For more, visit the Wedding UK Diary. Pictured: Naomi and husband Graham on their wedding day.