B.C. couple celebrates 'no sign of cancer' after palliative wedding more than 1 year ago

Oak Bay, B.C. -

Nicala Stacey is looking at pictures from the past year, in disbelief.

“It’s mind-boggling,” she says.

It all began that day her partner Dennis started experiencing chest pains during a hike in the forest and took a detour to the hospital emergency room.

“They were surprised I had walked in,” Dennis Stacey said from his hospital bed during an interview from 2022. “They thought I should probably have died.”

Dennis was diagnosed with an aggressive and inoperable tumour in his heart and placed in palliative care.

“As a dad, you need to look your kids in the eye and tell them all the things you need to tell them to say goodbye,” Dennis says.

And then you turn to your partner of 14 years and propose. Nicala said, "yes."

“She was like, ‘Absolutely,’ and ran out the door,” Dennis laughed. “When she came back (three hours later), there was a wedding.”

After Nicala and Dennis exchanged vows (surrounded by a handful of friends and family) in the hospital’s courtyard, the couple spent their honeymoon in his hospital room.

Dennis and Nicala said all things they needed to say.

“Say, 'I love you.' Say, 'I forgive you,'” Dennis said, stroking his wife’s hair and kissing her forehead. “And before you know it, you’re lifted up by it and you’re living in pure light and joy.”

But before Nicala knew it, the doctor surprised them with a “wedding gift” — an unexpected plan for risky open-heart surgery — which Dennis survived.

“They sent us home on a wing and a prayer,” Nicala laughs.

“It’s extraordinarily uncomfortable,” Dennis says of the weeks following his surgery, before laughing. “But you have to take into consideration, you’re not dead!”

But Dennis was told he would be soon. Best case scenario, he had just over a year.

“The goal was to get to the kids' graduation,” Nicala says.

So Dennis started researching alternative treatments, pursued unprecedented protocols, and a now, more than a year later, instead of dying, Dennis says there are no signs of cancer in his body at all.

“People do not survive pulmonary artery intimal sarcoma,” Dennis smiles. “It feels like spectacular.”

Not only did they get to see their oldest kids graduate, the couple created a website detailing their experience to give others hope, and returned to the forest where this all began, to express gratitude for the cancer Dennis now calls "a gift."

“Our suffering gives us the opportunity to learn and grow in ways the good times never will.” Dennis says.

Like their first wedding anniversary (that they never expected to celebrate): an opportunity to be grateful that they turned the worst experience of their lives into the best.