LARKSPUR, Colo. — The room filled with oohs and ahhs from Sabrina Blosky's family as she stood in front of a mirror admiring the beading at the top of the dress she was about to get married in.
She'd been dating her now-husband Rex for eight years. But this day was more than just a celebration of their relationship. It was a fresh start from years riddled with challenge after challenge.
"I feel beautiful and it wasn't always like that," Blosky said. "I don't know. I just looked in the mirror and I felt beautiful again. I'm going to cry."
Blosky, now 31 years old, was diagnosed with breast cancer just before her 27th birthday.
"When I got the news, obviously, it was like a kick in the stomach," Ungar said. "I was like, 'No way, I'm too young. There's no way that's ever a possibility.' As much as I hate to admit it, I didn't want to be afraid. But I think that's just the nature of the beast."
Blosky said she struggled to see herself as beautiful through the years of treatment and surgeries, but said she only recently realized it was a problem because Rex continued to build her up.
"Rex always made me feel so pretty all the time," she said. "So I was like, 'OK, nothing's wrong with me. I'll go to the grocery store bald."
Blosky recently finished her final treatment for the cancer and said "it's not even in the forefront" of her mind anymore.
Instead, she's focused on walking down the aisle at a wedding gifted to her by a woman who knows Blosky's pain all too well.
Cheryl Ungar is the founder and president of The Wedding Pink, "a wedding giveaway package awarded to a couple whose lives have recently been touched by breast cancer," according to the organization's website.
Ungar is a 28-year cancer survivor. She started The Wedding Pink in 2010 and gifted her first wedding in 2011.
"I know what all these young women are going through and it's just a hard time in your life," Ungar said. "I mean, it's probably the one time in my life where you just look at yourself in the mirror and it doesn't look like you."
She said her group gives one wedding a year and they're always held in Colorado, but the couple doesn't have to live in the state. She said it's a way to help after expensive treatments and a lack of energy from battling cancer.
"It's just really a way to let these couples start their life off," Ungar said. "It's a new life. You're done with cancer, you're well and now this is a beautiful marriage. You're starting over with this beautiful life and we're just sort of giving them that start."
According to the Wedding Pink's website, each wedding is valued at more than $40,000.
"I was really in awe," Blosky said about learning she was being given a wedding. "I was shocked and I was like, 'I don't know what to do. Do I cry? Because I feel like I'm going to ugly, open-mouth cry soon.'
She said she looked at Rex in disbelief because she couldn't believe that "this is our reality, this is really happening to us."
She said she had to pinch herself over and over to remind herself what was happening. And on October 17, 2019 at 4:30 p.m., she walked down in the aisle in her shimmery, white dress to an orchestra playing Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours," to a man who always made her feel beautiful.
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