I was high on some powerful drugs in a busy Mater public hospital ward when I decided to ask my life partner to marry me. We’d been together 24 years by then and had two children, now teenagers, so it didn’t exactly feel like I was rushing into anything.
It was a Sunday evening in February last year when the hospital plan was hatched. My kind and supportive oldest and youngest sisters were visiting me at the time, as I recovered from a leg operation following an injury that happened when I fell down the stairs in a hurry to go to the bathroom. It’s a family joke that I was forever rushing to go to the toilet as a child, always leaving it to the last minute, banging on the front door in a right state as I came home from school. Finally, perhaps inevitably, my bad habit had landed me in hospital.
Still off my bin on whatever drugs the anaesthetist provided to knock me out during the operation, I asked my sisters for their suggestions as to how I might fully express my gratitude and love to my partner for his support over the previous few months. He’d been as wonderful a life partner as any woman could reasonably hope for as we navigated the worst weeks and months of our lives: a cancer diagnosis followed by even worse medical news. It was my youngest sister who had the idea for the proposal. She had asked her partner, Killian, to marry her on that day a number of years before. Maybe I could use the impending Leap Year to ask Jonny the same question?
“Yes!” my drug-addled brain agreed. “A proposal followed swiftly by a summer wedding.” Just the tonic for someone who has been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and was receiving several months of chemotherapy with two dodgy legs. I had broken my left ankle shortly after the diagnosis, slipping on a rain-soaked path on the way to a Christmas carol service. If you didn’t laugh, you’d crack up completely.
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Of course, I shared news of my imminent proposal with the entire ward. A group of feisty, chatty women all dealing with their own demons and medical issues. When my sisters left that night I serenaded the women with Gilbert O’Sullivan songs and shared my entire life story whether they wanted to hear it or not. And naturally I invited each of these complete strangers to my impending, by that stage still mostly fictional, wedding celebrations. (If you are reading this, fellow patients, I am sorry I didn’t follow through on these invites; it was the drugs.) I also rang my mother and demanded she bring in copies of her memoir Openhearted and a jar of the marmalade she’d made the day before for every single woman on the ward (again, the drugs), which she generously did.
[ Openhearted by Ann Ingle: A warm, witty voice and a sharp mindOpens in new window ]
After the singing and the life-storytelling, I stayed awake all night writing a self-help book proposal on my phone with the working title Cancer? No bother to you! in which I outlined how it was possible to stay upbeat and chirpy even when your world is turned upside down and back to front. (I really cannot overstate how excellent those drugs were.)
The next day my teenage daughters, on their midterm break, came in to visit me. I told them the marriage proposal plan. They were not convinced about the idea, perhaps because I was still clearly high on my anaesthetist’s supply. When my oncology consultant came around to see me, I apparently told her that this cancer business was the best thing that had ever happened to me so in fairness they had reason to be dubious.
“What if he says no, mum?” asked one daughter, which was a reasonable question. Unfortunately, it was overheard by one of my new best friends on the ward who decided to berate my daughters for not being more supportive. At which point, mortified and appalled, the girls ran away. When they eventually returned, my fellow inmate apologised to them and peace was restored.
He was completely unaware of the tradition that says women can ask men to marry them on Leap Day
A few weeks later, out of hospital and sporting a freshly shorn head, I bought a silk tie with pale blue and pink flowers from Magee as part of my marriage plot. I had invited Jonny to the Garden Room in the Merrion Hotel for dinner on Leap Day, February 29th, hoping he wouldn’t twig the significance of the date.
The day before the dinner, I brought the tie in a fancy box to the restaurant, so staff could hide it in the kitchen and then produce it with the dessert at which point I’d pop the question. It all went beautifully to plan. I got down on one dodgy knee with the tie and said “Jonny, will you tie the knot with me?”. He said yes despite being completely unaware of the tradition that says women can ask men to marry them on Leap Day – he thought this romantic display was me being typically contrary.
Four months later, reader, I married him. Which just goes to show, sometimes the drugs do work.
