Groom misses wedding reception because tumor is mistaken for migraine

Missing your wedding day is more than just a headache, but this groom’s migraine that ruined the reception turned out to be much more serious.

Nathan Vaughan had no choice but to miss his wedding reception in May after marrying his current wife Katie Vaughan, née Glass, due to a “painful” migraine, spending the evening “passed out” in his Cambridgeshire hotel room instead of celebrating his nuptials.

Although he initially thought his headache was due to pre-wedding jitters, it persisted for three days and required a visit to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor requiring surgery.

“I took painkillers, migraine tablets and I thought it was wedding day jitters, I was feeling a bit of pressure. But it didn’t go away and it got progressively worse throughout the day,” Nathan, 30, told Kennedy News, adding that until 2am on his wedding day he was “fine”.

“(That it’s) the wedding day of all days, it’s crazy.”

Even the photographer noticed that the groom seemed “a little weird,” and Nathan was eventually sequestered in his bed while suffering from “the worst headache of his life.”

“I thought, ‘I’ll never get over this,'” he recalls.

“My first thought was, ‘My wife is alone on our wedding day.’ I lay upstairs, covered in guilt for leaving her alone.”

But Katie, 26, “coached brilliantly” and “ran the reception” on her own, despite being “devastated” that her new husband was ill on their wedding night.

“I said to the kitchen, ‘You better cut the cake,’ and I got to work,” she recalls. “My dad danced with me at the end of the night, God bless him.”

But three days later the pain persisted and Katie rushed Nathan to hospital where doctors diagnosed him with a benign pituitary tumour, which they described as being as big as two inches.

“There was a hemorrhage the morning (of my wedding), so I bled into my brain,” he explained, adding that it took a four-hour surgery to remove it because it was pushing against his optic nerve and affecting his vision.

“I don’t think Katie realized how much she was going to have to care for me shortly after she said ‘in sickness and in health’. It’s a long healing process.”

While the couple are grateful that things could have been worse but weren’t, they issued a warning about the little-known symptoms of a brain tumor that easily mimicked a migraine.

“I imagine a lot of people would think it was a headache and not think to see a doctor,” Nathan said, explaining that many people could suffer from it their entire lives without knowing it.

“If it had happened the day before, the wedding wouldn’t have happened, and if it had happened the day after, I would have put it down to a hangover from the alcohol and probably wouldn’t have had the wedding investigated.”

Luckily, the couple hadn’t planned an immediate honeymoon, or that too would have been cut short by the tumor. Instead, they’re heading to Kos, Greece, next year, where they’ll see “blue skies, beaches and hopefully no migraines.”

“It was a strange time,” Katie said of her big day. “I love looking at the pictures but at the same time, it was a really strange day. Not what I had imagined for my wedding.”

While Nathan is “grateful” to have seen his “wife walk down the aisle,” the couple re-throws their reception for their first wedding anniversary and invites all of their guests to celebrate once again.

“We’ll have our first dance a year later, we’ll give my speech and we’ll cut the cake,” Nathan said. “Better late than never.”