Bride spends wedding night in A&E after falling and breaking both arms

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES – Kirsty Bridges certainly turned heads in the A&E department after showing up in her wedding finery.

A mum-of-one spent the night of her wedding party in hospital after falling and breaking both her arms.

Kirsty Bridges, 39, should have been enjoying the night with her new husband Phil, 40.

But instead, the pair – still dressed in their wedding outfits – were turning heads in A&E after the bride, of Braunton, Devon, was accidentally knocked over by a guest and, falling awkwardly, broke both arms.

Kirsty, who has recently welcomed her first child with designer Phil, said: “The last thing I expected was to spend my night in hospital, getting X-rayed in my wedding dress.

“When Phil and I first walked in, in all our finery, everyone was looking at us.

“I had to go back to the same hospital a few times to attend the fracture clinic, and eventually it became a notorious story. Staff would see me and say, ‘You’re the one who came in in your wedding gear.’”

Sadly, the painful tumble was not the first setback Kirsty, who runs her own business called Lovebird Jewellery, faced around her nuptials.

She had originally planned to tie the knot with Phil, who she met through mutual friends in 2013, on New Year’s Eve 2016 – 10 months after he proposed in Lisbon, Portugal.

However, just two months after announcing her engagement, she was dealt a devastating blow when her dad Barry was diagnosed with cancer.

“My sister owns a barn, so Phil and I had hoped we could marry there on New Year’s Eve. It all seemed great, and easy to plan – but then my dad’s diagnosis was a massive bombshell,” said Kirsty. “I’d actually been hospitalised with pneumonia right before he was diagnosed, so I couldn’t even see him at first due to infection risk.”

Explaining that doctors diagnosed Barry with cancer of unknown primary, where the origin of the disease cannot be found, she added: “It was horrific to deal with.”

Keen for her dad to be there on her big day, Kirsty decided to move everything forward to September 2016 – but sadly, Barry rapidly declined.

So, worried a big ceremony may be too much for him, she instead opted to marry at The Hermitage, a country house on the Isle of Wight, in August 2016, organising everything in just a week.

“The original dress I’d wanted to wear wasn’t ready, so I had to go out on a shopping spree in Southampton and get basically everything there,” she said. “Absolutely everything was organised in a week.

“It was a very intimate wedding day, with only around 20 people there, but Dad walked me down the aisle and even made a speech, which meant the world.”

Though they had officially wed, Kirsty and Phil still wanted to celebrate their union with all their loved ones who hadn’t been able to make the last-minute August ceremony, and so planned to keep the September date as a part of their nuptials.

Tragically, though, Barry passed away, aged 73, just days before.

In no state to celebrate, Kirsty opted to cancel the day, escaping instead to Italy on what should have been her honeymoon.

“It was very surreal,” she said. “People kept seeing we were recently married and gushing about us being on our honeymoon, when it wasn’t exactly like that. It was bittersweet.”

Back home, Kirsty realised she still wanted to celebrate her marriage with her nearest and dearest, but, given that it is such an in-demand time, everything was booked up for New Year’s Eve, her original wedding date.

Instead, she rearranged everything for 30 December 2016, holding the party for around 100 in her sister’s barn at New Barn Farm in Calbourne, on the Isle of Wight.

At first, everything was going perfectly, until a guest accidentally knocked into her and she fell to the floor.

She recalled: “It was a total accident, but I fell awkwardly, going face forward and putting my arms out to stop myself. I landed and shouted out for Phil as I was in pain.

“I hoped he’d tell me that I was being silly and to get up, but when I saw his face, I knew something was wrong. Everyone was crowding round me looking really panicked. My arm was quite bent and very obviously broken.”

Rushed to St Mary’s Hospital on the outskirts of Newport, she didn’t even have time to change out of her finery.

With Phil, suited and booted, by her side, she was X-rayed and given gas and air for the pain.

Confirming that she had broken both her left and right arm, she was told she would need surgery.

“They didn’t have any beds that night, though, so they told me I could either wait in A&E or go back to my sister’s house and try and get some sleep,” she said. “I ended up leaving about 4am, then getting a call around 8am to say it was time to come back.”

The next day – New Year’s Eve – she returned to St Mary’s for K-Wire surgery, where stainless-steel wires are used to hold broken bones in the corrected position, sticking out of the skin so they can be easily removed once the break has healed.

“I saw in 2017 from my hospital bed, which wasn’t what I’d planned,” she laughed.

In total, her arms were in casts for six weeks, after which she underwent physiotherapy to rebuild her strength.

Now, she said that she and Phil count their wedding anniversary as being in August, to coincide with the ceremony her dad could attend.

And they have jokingly dubbed 30th December their ‘wristiversary’.

Discussing whether she would ever renew her vows, Kirsty laughed, “I’m not sure what else would happen if we did!

“We always laugh that everything that went wrong felt like the universe telling us not to get married, but actually, despite it all, we’re really well matched and really strong.

“Even though he hates hospitals, Phil has been by my side throughout and I couldn’t be more grateful.”

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations called Tuesday for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” of mass graves uncovered at two major hospitals in war-torn Gaza that were raided by Israeli troops.

Credible investigators must have access to the sites, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters, and added that more journalists need to be able to work safely in Gaza to report on the facts.

Earlier Tuesday, U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk said he was “horrified” by the destruction of the Shifa medical center in Gaza City and Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis as well as the reported discovery of mass graves in and around the facilities after the Israelis left.

He called for independent and transparent investigations into the deaths, saying that “given the prevailing climate of impunity, this should include international investigators.”

“Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law,” Türk said. “And the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are ‘hors de combat’ (incapable of engaging in combat) is a war crime.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Tuesday called the reports of mass graves at the hospitals “incredibly troubling” and said U.S. officials have asked the Israeli government for information.

The Israeli military said its forces exhumed bodies that Palestinians had buried earlier as part of its search for the remains of hostages captured by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. The military said bodies were examined in a respectful manner and those not belonging to Israeli hostages were returned to their place.

The Israeli military says it killed or detained hundreds of militants who had taken shelter inside the two hospital complexes, claims that could not be independently verified.

The Palestinian civil defense in the Gaza Strip said Monday that it had uncovered 283 bodies from a temporary burial ground inside the main hospital in Khan Younis that was built when Israeli forces were besieging the facility last month. At the time, people were not able to bury the dead in a cemetery and dug graves in the hospital yard, the group said.

The civil defense said some of the bodies were of people killed during the hospital siege. Others were killed when Israeli forces raided the hospital.

Palestinian health officials say the hospital raids have destroyed Gaza’s health sector as it tries to cope with the mounting toll from over six months of war.

The issue of who could or should conduct an investigation remains in question.

For the United Nations to conduct an investigation, one of its major bodies would have to authorize it, Dujarric said.

“I think it’s not for anyone to prejudge the results or who would do it,” he said. “I think it needs to be an investigation where there is access and there is credibility.”

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said after visiting Israel and the West Bank in December that a probe by the court into possible crimes by Hamas militants and Israeli forces “is a priority for my office.”

The discovery of the graves "is another reason why we need a cease-fire, why we need to see an end to this conflict, why we need to see greater access for humanitarians, for humanitarian goods, greater protection for hospitals” and for the release of Israeli hostages, Dujarric said Monday.

In the Hamas attack that launched the war, militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says the militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

In response, Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza, aimed at eliminating Hamas, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, around two-thirds of them children and women. It has devastated Gaza’s two largest cities, created a humanitarian crisis and led around 80% of the territory’s population to flee to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave.

FILE - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, speaks during a news conference in Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 9, 2023. The United Nations is calling for "a clear, transparent and credible investigation" of mass graves uncovered at two major hospitals in war-torn Gaza that were raided by Israeli troops. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban, File)