A Florida man proposed to his girlfriend who has been undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma on the first day of her last chemotherapy session.
Starting at the 2:50 mark, watch 24-year-old Lucas D’Onofrio pop the question to 21-year-old Tamara Bruzzo in a room at Boca Raton Regional Hospital that was decorated with 100 candles and 60 ballons tied to 60 pictures of the two of them from the last six years that they were dating. She was already dressed up because friends and family were throwing her a Hollywood-themed party that night, the first of several theme parties she had planned for her last five-day session. He handed her a bouquet of 100 roses, and then got down on one knee. After she said yes, the two looked out the window and enjoyed a fireworks display two neighborhoods away that he had also organized for the occasion.
“When he popped the question, I was completely shocked,” Bruzzo said. “It shows no matter what you go thru, good things can happen to you.”
D’Onofrio, who shaved his head in solidarity after her second chemo session, said he organized the elaborate proposal because he “just wanted to do something great for her at the end of something horrible in her life.”
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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com