#’This might be your only chance’

“In sickness and in health” never meant more.

Emergency room patients Elizabeth Kerr and fiancé Simon O’Brien didn’t plan on a short engagement. But when COVID-19 nurses told them, “this might be your only chance,” the fatally sick pair decided it was now — or possibly never.

“Those are words I never, ever want hear again,” Kerr, 31, told Reuters, from a COVID-19 ward at the University Hospital in Milton Keynes, a borough about 50 miles northwest of London.

The lovers were wed in the intensive care unit, a few days after they arrived at the ER in the same ambulance. Kerr, a nurse, and paramedic O’Brien, 36, had tested positive for COVID-19 just days before — and months before their June wedding date.

Kerr recalled that her husband, critically low on blood oxygen, barely held on while nurses scrambled to find a spare marriage license.

Kerr and O’Brien were married at 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 15, accompanied by nurse Hannah Cannon, witness to the ceremony on behalf of family and friends who were not allowed to be in the quarantined unit. The catering department also provided cake to celebrate the occasion.

The honeymoon period was short lived as O’Brien’s vitals fell rapidly after saying “I do,” immediately forcing him into the care of mechanical ventilation and chemical sedation overnight.

“I was trying to get back [my] energy, which I couldn’t afford, but I tried my best to really fight for my breath back,” O’Brien said of the arduous ceremony.

The newlyweds have since reunited — and kissed, finally — following an upswing in O’Brien’s condition, though both remain attached to oxygen masks.

“We’ve got a wedding story that can trump anybody’s,” Kerr said.

For as many weddings that have been put on hold by the pandemic, stories like Kerr and O’Brien’s are silver linings in a grim year. Similarly, Texas man Carlos Muniz made a miraculous recovery from the virus after nurses arranged for him to wed his fiancée Grace Leimann from his hospital bed.

“A lot of people started volunteering for it — and before you knew it, every nurse in the unit knew about it and was trying to figure out ways to make it more special,” Holdridge said in an emotional Facebook video. “What better way to help him recover than to fulfill their dream of getting married together?”