Hospital Staff and Family Use Technolgy to Get Father to Wedding

Sunday, February 05, 2012

A Hospital stay kept Reading attorney George Shoop from physically attending his son’s wedding this summer, but Hospital nurses and his daughter used technology to allow him to participate and have memories to last a lifetime.

Shoop was admitted to The Reading Hospital and Medical Center in August with cellulitis of the left leg and foot. With a full week of antibiotic treatments ahead him, it became obvious that he would not able to travel that weekend to Cincinnati for his son’s wedding. The nurses on R3E were heartbroken to hear that Shoop would miss his son’s wedding, and, unbeknownst to him, found a way to get him to the church.

“On the day before the wedding, to my complete surprise and without my family or me requesting it, I was advised by Lisa DelPizzo, Care Management, that she had initiated and arranged with the Hospital’s IT Department to provide me with a laptop and webcam, and offered to coordinate a computer hookup with my family in Cincinnati to allow me to watch the wedding ceremony via Skype,” Shoop recalled. “Lisa, together with Ed Eidam of the IT Department, made all of the arrangements with the Cincinnati side, so that on the day of the wedding, literally five minutes before the ceremony and after a few glitches, a Skype connection was made.”

The nurses rescheduled Shoop’s tests and treatments that day so he could devote his attention to his son and even brought him a “piece of wedding cake” from the cafeteria. Shoop, DelPizzo, Eidman and RN Robin Valukevich recently shared their memories of this experience with Reading Eagle reporter Jason Brudereck for an upcoming feature.

That is not the end of Shoop’s virtual wedding attendance. This past week, Shoop’s daughter decided that her dad needed to be included in the formal account of the wedding. Using her considerable Photoshop skills,  Shoop’s daughter “added” her father to the official wedding photos.

As only a loving daughter can do, she found pictures of dad lounging in a kiddie pool, shooting a water gun, and running on to the field of a high school football game to include in pictures of the wedding party and reception. Those pictures, titled "Dad missed brother's wedding, photoshopped him in" at http://imgur.com/a/rSXoc almost immediately went viral and, within a few days, almost 5 million people shared Shoop’s experience.

Shoop's story also appears in today's Reading Eagle.