Eighteen-year-old Swift Myers has been battling cancer since the seventh grade and is now fighting for his life. On Friday, the high schooler married his girlfriend of two years in a ceremony that was live streamed on Facebook.
Myers has beaten Ewing's sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, six times, but it recurred again and he’s been in intensive care for more than a month, Tulsa World reported. He and his now-wife, Abbi Ruicker, 18, met as students at Charles Page High School.
Though Myers was unable to buy an engagement ring and get down on one knee to propose, he did call Ruicker’s father to ask for her hand in marriage.
“I knew I was going to ask her to marry me when I woke up that morning,” Myers told Tulsa World.
When nurses at Saint Francis Children’s Hospital learned about the upcoming nuptials— the first at the hospital— they joined in by helping decorate the lobby, ordering cake, hiring photographers and making decorative bows out of bed sheets.
“I was super excited,” Emmy Ralston, a pediatric oncology nurse who has been with Myers since his first diagnosis, told Tulsa World. “Swift has so many friends and family, it was awesome they thought of us.”
Myers even got a bachelor party the night before the ceremony, which Tulsa World reported involved a lot of Chick-fil-A and Mountain Dew.
“I’ve never seen my best friend happier in his entire life, and I trust Abbi to give him many more smiles,” groomsman Dakota Spears told Tulsa World.