Moment bride-to-be has tearful breakdown the night before her wedding after ‘losing’ her dress at luxury hotel and food giving her ‘stomach ache’

A cancer survivor, who battled a 13cm tumour, has claimed her wedding day was ruined at a hotel after her dress was allegedly lost and she was left with a “sore stomach”.

Elizabeth Slade, 43, travelled to the four-star DoubleTree Hilton hotel near Thame, Oxfordshire, ahead of the special occasion, which took place last Saturday.

But she spent the early hours of the morning of the wedding in a state of collapse and filmed a clip of herself explaining the “nightmare experience” she had.

The carer said she dropped off the white dress on Tuesday last week and arrived at the hotel on Friday, but when she arrived, she claimed no staff member helped her because she was struggling with her bags.

The 43-year-old woman claims that the staff gave her a Twix bar and a KitKat bar as an apology for the treatment she received.

At 8pm on the day before her wedding, Elizabeth dined at the restaurant with her friend. She had calamari, her friend opted for fish and chips and they shared a bottle of champagne.

But the bride-to-be reportedly suffered food poisoning from her meal and described the squid as “chewy”, while her friend was unaffected by her dish.

About two hours later, she went down to the front desk to pick up her wedding dress, but the woman at the counter told her she had no idea what she was talking about.

Elizabeth told FEMAIL: ‘She looked at me and asked, ‘What dress?’. So I panicked and said, ‘The wedding dress, the dress I’m wearing tomorrow for my wedding.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know anything about that?’

‘At that point I started to feel sick. I ran to the bathroom and had to go down to reception to get more rolls of toilet paper because there was only one in the room.’

Elizabeth then went outside because she was on the verge of tears when they couldn’t find her dress.

“They finally found my dress, I think around 11:30 at night. And obviously, there was panic for a while.

‘So I finally went to bed around one in the morning and woke up at two o’clock and I didn’t feel well at all.

‘I tried calling the front desk at three in the morning to say, “Can I have more toilet paper because I’m dying here?”

‘There was no response at all. I had a hard time getting to reception, which is about a 15-minute walk away. There were two men behind reception and I went downstairs crying, asking for a roll of toilet paper and saying I had had a horrible experience.

“I said, ‘I have food poisoning,’ and they just looked at me, they didn’t even say, ‘I’m sorry,’ or, ‘Can we help you? ’”

Elizabeth said she was crying on the floor at around 3am before travelling to her car to express her emotions, before filming herself crying.

In the clip, she said she had had “nothing but disasters” since arriving at the hotel, where the cheapest double room costs around £124 a night, adding that she felt “so miserable and disappointed”.

Elizabeth said: ‘I had wanted to get married all my life and have a special day, but it was turning into a disaster from start to finish.’

“I would never film myself crying, but I was like, ‘I need proof of this. I need proof of what I look like at 3 a.m. on my wedding day,'” she said.

‘The reason I say it’s not fair is what David and I have been through these last few years.’

In August 2021, Elizabeth was diagnosed with signet ring cell carcinoma, a rare type of cancer that begins in glandular cells.

She said: ‘The initial cancer treatment I was given was less than a year to live because they thought it had spread everywhere.

‘But actually, when I finally had (all my) surgeries and (treatments), they got rid of this massive 13cm tumor at the top of my rectum.

“I’m very lucky because the CT scan showed a big lump in my liver. So they automatically thought it had spread, but it was actually a group of blood vessels in my liver and it wasn’t cancer.

“As far as I know and as far as the medical professionals know, I don’t have cancer, which is just extraordinary.”

Elizabeth said cancer campaigner Dame Deborah James, also known as the Bowel Babe, helped her through tough times.

“If I hadn’t seen her videos, I don’t think I would have been able to take it with such a positive attitude. She was amazing and definitely helped me through my journey,” he added.

Elizabeth said she had been waiting to get married “all her life” and the final procedures had been carried out just four weeks before her wedding.

She said her family never had “a lot of money” and they were originally planning to have a low-key wedding and smaller nuptials.

But her mother won some money on a scratch-off ticket and decided to use that money to give Elizabeth the fairytale wedding she had always dreamed of.

‘My parents have worked hard all their lives. David and I have worked very hard and we have never had much money to spare.

‘We were planning a much more low-key wedding. I won the lottery of life and a year ago, my mother won some money from a scratch card just before Christmas.

‘He got really excited and said he’d like to pay for my wedding, so they upgraded it a bit later.

“I was able to have a beautiful wedding dress and my mom did surgery on my front teeth. Before, my front teeth weren’t perfect; they fell out when I was 10.”

Fortunately, Elizabeth was able to take some Imodium pills and felt well enough to walk down the aisle and marry the love of her life, David Slade, 47.

‘I finally went to sleep at 5am and slept for an hour before getting up again. I had a wedding breakfast booked but couldn’t eat it.

“I decided to call my maid of honor and ask her to bring me some Imodium pills. I took one and it seemed to work,” said Elizabeth, who has a teenage daughter from a previous relationship.

“Because of the squid, I was afraid that there would be an accident with my beautiful white wedding dress. I thought I would have to walk down the aisle holding my butt.”

She also managed to keep her cool at the reception afterwards at Notley Tythe Barn in Long Crendon, where she took to the microphone and sang three songs, including Madness’s “It Must Be Love”.

Now, looking back on the wedding that almost never happened, she says: “I haven’t even received an apology from the Hilton. It was absolutely horrible and I thought it was never going to happen.”

Her husband David did not find out about Elizabeth’s experience until their wedding day.

“I paid for a nightmare experience and I still haven’t been offered a refund,” he added.

The morning after their wedding, one of the wedding guests told the happy couple that they had been staying in a better room than theirs.

‘We got a standard suite and she found out the next day that a friend of hers, obviously it wasn’t the friend’s fault, but they gave him (a better room) before us.

“It’s a very large suite with two different rooms. I think we put two and two together and realized we should have chosen that one.”

Elizabeth said she called the hotel before the stay and was told they would be moved to a different room due to the special occasion.

“(My friend) said it felt like she was in the honeymoon suite because it was so much bigger than the one she had (originally) booked,” the mother of one said.

“It was the icing on the cake. At that moment I thought I wanted to leave the hotel.”

The couple are currently on their honeymoon in Cyprus and say they are having a “wonderful” time. Elizabeth added: “The hotel has been phenomenal. It’s literally the opposite of the Oxford experience.”

A Hilton spokesperson told MailOnline: “We consider every guest’s stay important and we want to ensure that every experience is a pleasant one.

“We were not aware of any complaints until the newspaper brought them to our attention recently. We don’t want anyone to feel that they haven’t had the best possible experience, so if Elizabeth gets in touch with us (which she hasn’t yet), we’d be happy to discuss it.”