Wed 12th March 2025
A midweek wedding meant getting the vendors they wanted for Cam and Roxy, while meeting a tight timeline to get surgery for a troublesome leg.
Cam and Roxy have known each otters for close to 20 years now.
Roxy remembers riding on the school bus with Cam’s younger brother during high school years. She was a fixture at the Rowlands household which was down the road from where she lived. Her friends dated his friends and vice versa but Cam and Roxy never became firm friends themselves until they’d both left school.
In 2018 they both went to London, still just as ‘friends’.
“For years and years and years people were always questioning Cam and I — whether we were a ‘thing’ or not.”
When romance blossomed in London, they didn’t tell anyone back home for about a year — they knew they would cop a lot of flak.
The couple returned to New Plymouth for a friend’s wedding in March 2020 — just before the first COVID lockdown — and ended up staying in the country but moving to Auckland for work opportunities.
They were together for nearly six years before Cam proposed at a beach bach in Omaha during June last year. They were looking after two dogs at the time, which made the proposal perfect for animal lover Roxy, who works as the head vet nurse at a Remuera clinic.
“He was super calm, he always is, and didn’t give anything away,” remembers Roxy of how here engineer husband handled it.
They planned to have the wedding just nine months later in their home region of Taranaki but timing was always going to be an issue.
“With my leg and stuff I’m always having surgeries — it’s never a good time,” says the cancer survivor (lung and bone). The venues they wanted were booked out for the next two years when Sandy from The Bungalow floated the idea of a midweek wedding.
“All the vendors we wanted were going to be available for a midweek wedding and from there everything happened so fast,” says Roxy, admitting she had no part in organising it, apart from organising her dress.
“Cam planned the whole wedding. It was so not my thing. The morning of the wedding was like the biggest surprise and it was all so perfect.”
Three weeks before the wedding date Roxy was admitted to hospital for a week, where they drained a litre of fluid from her knee. It transpired her kneecap had become displaced.
“Every step I took was like metal on bone.” Cement holds her cancer-affected leg together and it will involve major surgery to try and repair it. Roxy’s surgeon booked her in for surgery at the end of April, unsure if her fragile knee would make it to the wedding on 12th March.
The day itself dawned bright and sunny and things kicked off very early with hair and makeup 6am At about 11.30 Cam and Roxy met up for their ‘first look’ then had photos with the wedding party on the beach. The four bridesmaids wore black and chose their own dresses.
The ceremony was at 2.30pm and ironically the outspoken bride’s vows could barely be heard as Roxy had pretty much lost her voice after a raucous Hen’s Night the previous weekend.
The couple were delighted with everyone’s speeches and after dinner they headed down to the beach for some sunset photos.
The couple’s ‘first dance’ was filled with humour as the couple walked out to Ed Sheeran’s opening lines of Thinking Out Loud: ‘When your legs don’t work like they used to before …’ and ended with Roxy precariously balanced on Cam’s shoulders.
“Then the whole crowd joined in and no-one left the dance floor.”
Reflecting on the whole experience Roxy says, “It was THE BEST Day — everyone made it amazing. We felt like celebrities, it was just so perfect.”
But that’s not the end of the story …
The couple then returned to Auckland and in the following weeks Roxy had a meeting with her surgeon to prepare for the upcoming surgery on her knee. However, she had to let him know that there might be a slight hiccup to the surgery plans … sure enough, it turned out she was pregnant!