Canceled by coronavirus: A rom-com worthy love story and the wedding that almost was
True love waits, they say. Especially in the time of coronavirus. Elliott San, and his fiancée, Emily Mai, are not alone in having to cancel their wedding these days. But their story, and the journey that brought them here, might stand alone as being one of the most incredible: A real-life rom-com with so many twists and turns that any sane screenwriter would roll their eyes. And Elliott is a screenwriter.
Video Transcript
EMILY MAI: Our story does feel like one of those things that it's like you can't write this stuff. Like, you can't make this stuff up--
ELLIOTT SAN: Yeah, I know.
EMILY MAI: --because so many curveballs have been thrown at us.
ELLIOTT SAN: My name's Elliott, and I am a writer. I write primarily movies.
EMILY MAI: My name's Emily, and I'm a nurse, and I currently work at an oncology inpatient center. We were supposed to get married this weekend, but COVID had other plans.
ELLIOTT SAN: Yeah. In 2014, I was diagnosed with leukemia in Los Angeles. I received treatment first at USC and then moved back to Chicago afterwards to continue treatment at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
They showed me to my room. I walked in the room, and she was there setting up the room for the next 30 days.
EMILY MAI: Well, the first thing I saw was the back of his head, which was--
ELLIOTT SAN: Nice.
EMILY MAI: --partially bald, so. And we found out that we had a lot in common, that we were around the same age. We liked the same music. We were both half Chinese. So in that sense we kind of, I feel like, hit it off as friends.
ELLIOTT SAN: When they told me that I would probably be discharged the last-- the next day, the next-- I saw Emily and I asked her for her phone number. Hail Mary.
[LAUGHTER]
EMILY MAI: I thought that I would rather know that he was doing well than always wonder whatever happened to Elliott San?
ELLIOTT SAN: Well, after I was discharged, we started texting. Eventually we started hanging out and then eventually started dating and then eventually moved in together in Chicago. Then eventually I convinced her to move back to Los Angeles with me. It was about three years.
In August of 2018, I started feeling sick, and I basically had a flu that I couldn't kick. And we were getting a little worried, so we went to the doctor. And unfortunately the tests came back, and I had relapsed.
EMILY MAI: So before he was admitted to the hospital-- I was completely surprised, but he had decided that he was going to propose to me. We were actually going to a cake-making class with a couple of friends. Everyone was getting their cakes, and I was like, where's my cake? And then they come out with one that, like, I see writing on it, and they're coming towards me. And it says, "Marry me, Emily."
- Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
EMILY MAI: And, yeah, that's how we got engaged. [LAUGHS]
Right after we got engaged, Elliott had to go into the hospital a week later, and he got his second stem-cell transplant. So he was in the hospital for about a month.
ELLIOTT SAN: We purposely picked a date pretty far out just so that we knew that I would have enough time to be well by the wedding.
EMILY MAI: Having gone through what he went through again a second time, it did make the wedding really important to us.
So in January when I first heard of coronavirus, I was not thinking that it would affect my wedding at that point. I was thinking more like it would affect my job and my patients.
ELLIOTT SAN: As the coronavirus was getting worse, for us it was getting serious the week before our wedding. And our concern was both of myself being an immunocompromised person but also with our family members traveling. Most of our family was traveling from out of state to come to California for the wedding.
If I got coronavirus, my body just would not be able to fight it off the way that a normal person's immune system would. I would-- I mean--
EMILY MAI: And he would be at a higher risk of actually contracting it.
ELLIOTT SAN: I brought up the fact that maybe we might have to cancel the wedding. It was not the most peaceful conversation we've had.
[LAUGHTER]
EMILY MAI: I think I was a little bit in denial. I mean, I knew what was happening, and I had a bad feeling about it. But I felt like we had planned our wedding for so long, and we had been waiting for that day for so long that I just couldn't accept that it was true yet. When we first had that conversation, I was kind of in shock.
ELLIOTT SAN: I was so busy trying to figure out how I was going to reschedule an entire wedding that I didn't-- the sadness of the moment didn't really hit me until I think everything fell apart. And then we had to just say I guess we're going to be in our apartment on Saturday. We're hoping to reschedule in the late fall.
You know, in a way, we were brought together. We met because of my illness, and we've been through a second lap with that illness, and for illness to be the reason why we are not quite getting married has just sort of toughened our resolve. We've overcome so much already, and canceling a wedding is just another hurdle, I guess.
EMILY MAI: Yeah. We've waited how long already? What's another few months, I guess, at this point?
