A wedding can be the most stressful event in someone’s life as you begin to dread all the things that could possibly go wrong.
What if the rings go missing? What if my drunk uncle destroys the cake? But out of every possible oversight, I bet that blood-sucking leeches are probably the last thing on your mind.
However, that’s what happened to an Australian bride on the biggest day of her life.
TikTok user Madalyn Wise (@madalyn.wise) made the horrific discovery shortly after her first dance as a newlywed with her husband, Jayden.
The blushing bride has since shared a video of the incident on TikTok that has collected over 37 million views. The newlywed captioned the video: “There’s always something that doesn’t go quite right at your wedding, right?”
Check out Madalyn's first video below:In her first post, she shares sweet footage of her first dance with her new husband.
However, the overlay text reads: "What we discovered under my dress a few minutes after our first dance." The video then cuts to show Madalyn's wedding dress stained with blood.
After the first video amassed more than 12,000 comments, many people in the comments section admitted that they thought Madalyn had just come on her period at the most inopportune time. Many TikTokers were also desperate to find out just how the bride found herself covered in leeches.
So, in a second video, Madalyn explained everything.
"So, I live in Australia and we got married on the Gold Coast," she said. "In the weeks leading up to our wedding, we had a lot of rain."
The bride continued: "We had our ceremony. And then we went off to have our wedding portraits taken at the venue.
"So, during this photo session, we did have to go into some really long sludgy grass to get some nice photos. [...] This is where I think the leeches came into the picture. And yes. I said 'leeches'. There were three!"
"There was one underneath my foot, one in like, the pit of my knee, and there was another one just crawling up my leg," she adds. "It would have been there for, like, three hours.
"So, it was there from the photoshoot to our first dance. So it was literally on me throughout my whole reception."
After having her first dance with her husband, Madalyn was grabbed by her mother-in-law and dragged to a private area of the venue.
"I think had been dancing with my friends for maybe, like, one or two songs. And then all of a sudden my mother-in-law grabs me."
After noticing that she was bleeding all over her white dress, the bride assumed that she had become "so stressed" from the big day that she'd triggered an early period.
After her wedding coordinator and photographer helped to sponge the stains out of her dress, Madalyn was joined by her husband.
"I'll never forget the look on his face when he saw me," she says.
“Every day I open TikTok and just get another reason to not visit Australia,” joked one social media user in the comments section. To which, Madalyn replied: “Please do not take Australia off your bucket list just because of this. This is was a complete one-off, random unlucky thing that happened. It does not happen every day.”
Others also made several references to the Netflix series Stranger Things.
This led the bride to reply jokingly: “I’ve seen this Stranger Things comment a few times now, and what you guys don’t actually know, is this is actually a promo for the new season.”
In the aftermath of the embarrassing event, the bride showed she had thick bandages wrapped around her leg with tissues to help remove the leech.
Leeches are often mistaken to be mostly water-based as they thrive in those conditions but they can actually survive on land and in between grass after heavy rainfalls. They are not dangerous creatures so there was never any real risk to the blushing bride.
Their bite is painless because they release a chemical that numbs the sensation so they are not disturbed by the host when feasting.
But if you want to avoid becoming a leech’s happy meal, waterproof gaiters (or garters, on this occasion) are recommended.
