It’s commonly known that wedding insurance doesn’t cover medical conditions such as cold feet or changes of heart. However, as John Sparrow recently discovered, that’s not necessarily true, and in the case of his broken heart, his wedding insurance company paid in full. How so?

It was just before midday the day before the wedding; Cheryl, his fiancée, was busily sorting out the last minute arrangements, which generally meant fussing a lot whilst everyone else tried to calm her down. Meanwhile, John was preparing to head off in to town to meet up with a few of his friends, and to have a quiet word with his Best Man to try to persuade him not to include anything unsuitable in his speech.

He was vaguely aware of a certain light headedness, but put that down to nerves before the Big Day, and carried on. It was whilst he was in town sharing a pizza with his friends that suddenly he bent over double, clutching his chest. His friends initially thought he was just playing up (as men’s friends tend to do in a medical emergency), and although he recovered fairly quickly, and said it was probably just a touch of nerves, stress or heartburn, his friends were concerned enough to persuade him to get it checked out.

It’s not hard to imagine the frantic uproar which erupted when the Bride received a telephone call from the Best Man to explain that her fiancé had just been admitted to hospital with a suspected heart problem, and that they were carrying out a number of tests, including overnight ECG monitoring to identify the problem. In other words, he wouldn’t be at the wedding tomorrow.

As it turned out John had a genetic heart defect which had never previously troubled him, and which turned out to be relatively easy to treat. John and Cheryl eventually got married six months later thanks to the wedding insurance company paying all of the costs involved in postponing the entire event. Perhaps not a case of a broken heart so much as a faulty one, but at least his feat remained warm.