all hail vic

to breathe or not to breathe

so, what's the worst possible single thing that could happen at a wedding (excluding the marrying couple)?

hooking up with the sister of the bride? maybe. but it didn't happen.

the priest being drunk? maybe. but it didn't happen.

somebody dying? probably.

i went to a wedding this weekend. two of my frisbee friends here in praha got married at a castle in southern Moravia, about 30 or 40 kilometres north of the Slovakian border. the castle is "Lednice" Castle, which in Czech means "refrigerator". it was/is a very romantic location to hold a wedding - there were no fewer than 4 other brides wandering around the grounds at the same time as the wedding i was at.

(actually, their wedding invitation was cute: it was shaped like a refrigerator and had a picture of them on the door of the refrigerator. and on the back it said, "Lednice, a cool place to get married".)

anyway, so friday night was a pig roast at one of the two hotels where guests were staying. it was a fun little gig with czech folk music being played.

i stayed in that hotel, so getting to sleep was easy - but i was scheduled to be the DJ on saturday night and i still had some planning to do for that. so i cashed out of the pig roast - where i didn't eat any pig, since i'm a modified non-pig, non-cow incomplete vegetarian - at about 12 o'clock. i stayed up until 2 doing the planning.

on saturday (aka yesterday), i woke up at 9:30-ish, had some breakfast, and hoofed it to the castle for a 11:00a.m. free tour of the interior. Lednice Castle was originally built by the Lichtensteins and was used as a vacation home - mostly for hunting is my guess, considering the obescene number of trophies adorning almost every room.

i did the tour of the interior of the palace. the grounds of the castle are something like 180 acres including an arabic-style minaret. from the castle, i walked around an enormous lake to get to the minaret and climbed the minaret. it is about 60 metres tall and offered a good view of the surroundings. i didn't have much time, however, since the wedding started at 3p.m. and i still had to change and shower and the time was about 1p.m. and I still had to get back to my hotel, a 35-minute walk away...

so i hoofed it back to my hotel and changed. i walked with some other guests to the wedding. after some discussion about where the wedding was actually taking place in the castle, we finally figured it out and started around to the back of the castle.

as we were walking up to the room where the ceremony was to take place, much joy was being had. the details of the ceremony were beginning to be unveiled. most importantly, the bride was to pull up in a horse-drawn carriage. and so it would go...

until the bride's aunt passed out. people immediately began to maneuver her into an easier position, as she had passed out on the gravel road leading up to the back of the castle. but her (the aunt's) daughter wasn't having any of it, she wouldn't let anybody move her...

until she started turning blue and her daughter also passed out. let me say, at this point, that the weather was very nice and quite warm, meaning people were all dressed rather warmly on a hot day with no clouds and a blazing sun.

thankfully, one of the party was an e.r. doctor and would be able to help with the bride's aunt...

if he could've been found. (he was wandering around the interior of the palace, waiting for the bride to show up.) he was found about 3 minutes after she passed out. however, luckily, a czech ems technician happened to be biking by and saw the woman passed out. she immediately moved the lady's tongue to allow her to breathe again.

the american e.r. doctor showed up.

they started doing cpr and pounding her chest.

of note, Lednice is a small town without a hospital so the nearest ambulance was 15 minutes away.

the mystery biker and the e.r. doctor continued mouth to mouth for the 15 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive.

upon arrival, the ambulance crew immediately defibrillated and intubated her. she didn't respond. the last hope is a shot of adrenalin... which started her heart again... since her heart had stopped... she had been complaining of shortness of breath before she passed out... the e.r. doctor said that's a good indication of a heart attack...

they took her away in the ambulance. last i heard, she was sitting up in bed and communicating via writing, since she can't speak due to the intubation tube.

once the ambulance was successfully away (at around 3:45p.m., long after the ceremony would've ended if the incident had never happened), the bride pulled up in the horse-drawn carriage and the ceremony took place (in czech with english translation).

suffice it to say, the mood of the party/ceremony went from joyous to bleak to a mostly-recovered joyousness, since the aunt had pulled through.

after the ceremony (and some tossing of a frisbee) came the reception. i went back to my room, picked up my laptop from which i was to play the music, and hustled to the reception.

at the reception, we had traditional czech roast duck with cabbage and dumplings - very tasty and very filling. the groom, upon removing the bride's garter, looked right at me and through it directly at me. a gypsy band (sounding a lot like "The Gypsy Kings") played and i played music in between their sets and again after the band finished completely. i got to sleep around 4a.m.

today, i had breakfast, walked around the castle-grounds with some friends and came back to prague, more or less.

oh, and one of the groom's aunts had her camera and wallet stolen from her room, in what seemed like the more secure hotel (not mine).

Posted by iain at April 24, 2005 05:43 PM