The past year has been incredibly trying for health care workers, but even amidst a global health crisis, love finds a way to bloom.
Kelsey Dunlap and Jacob Young are both ER nurses at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Georgia. They met during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hospital’s AirLift helipad as they worked to transport critically ill patients. Kelsey says their connection was instant.
“When you know, you know,” she said simply. After dating for more than a year, Jacob decided to pop the question, but he didn’t want just any old proposal. Instead, he worked with hospital administration to arrange a special moment on the rooftop where they first met!
Kelsey described the scene on Facebook, writing, “What I thought was just another day at work, picking up another patient off the helipad. INSTEAD…. The love of my life flew in on a helicopter, dropped to a knee, and made me the luckiest girl on the planet.”
In a video, we see Kelsey pushing a gurney towards the helicopter to retrieve the patient, but at the last minute, Jacob appeared instead. You can see how excited and surprised she is as she says yes and gives him a huge hug!
She later learned what lengths Jacob had gone to to make her dream proposal happen and was blown away. First, he got the AirLife team to play along, even posing as a patient to make it look like a real patient transfer. Next, he managed to finagle the rest of the day off for them both so they could celebrate right away. He even hired a photographer and had Kelsey’s manager say they were taking pictures for “nurses’ week” so she wouldn’t be suspicious!
“It took a village,” Jacob said about planning the proposal. “It took about three other nurses, two or three people from my management team to come up with this whole scheme, lie, to get her up on the chopper at the exact right moment for what I thought was the perfect idea for us.”
Kelsey was completely shocked by the surprise!
“I’m not an easy girl to surprise so bless his heart he somehow pulled it off,” she said.
After such a difficult time dealing with the pandemic, Kelsey is looking forward to the next chapter of her life with Jacob.
“This has been a very rough last two years for everyone in health care but we are just so blessed to get to have my best friend and my biggest rock at work with me every day,” she explained. “We get to go home together, it’s just really incredible that we got to meet and grow our relationship.”
Nurses work so hard for us all, so we’re delighted to see two of them find love in spite of a stressful year! Congratulations to Kelsey and Jacob!
Check out video of Jacob asking Kelsey to marry him below, and don’t forget to share.
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