This Bride Was Temporarily Blinded By Her Wedding Flowers & Here’s What You Should Know

Back in September 2017, bride-to-be Christine Jo Miller stepped outside on the day of her wedding to pick wildflowers to add to her bouquet and wedding trellis. She ended up choosing a bunch of pretty green-and-white plants with long, delicate-looking leaves. That done, Miller, 23, headed back inside to wash her face. That, she told PEOPLE, was when the trouble started. What began with a rash and watery eyes ended in temporary blindness, and now, six months after her original wedding, Miller and her husband Jon, 24, are getting a second chance, thanks to Steve Harvey.

It turns out that Miller had picked a wildflower that was actually toxic: snow-on-the-mountain, a ground cover plant whose sap is seriously poisonous. Because of how much sap is present all over the plant, when Miller went inside to wash her face after gathering the leaves, she was rubbing the sap directly into her eyes. Miller told PEOPLE she got a rash very soon after picking the flowers on her face, spread down her neck and arms, and her watery eyes started "burning," she said. "I kept my eyes shut while I got my hair done and even tried to calm them with cucumbers, but when I opened my eyes everything was super blurry and I couldn’t see."

"I didn't really know what to think when the reaction started," Miller tells Bustle. "When [my] eyes started burning I thought, 'OK, just give it a couple hours and drink a lot of water to flush whatever is going on out of my system'." But once she lost her sight, she says, "I realized we were going downhill and not uphill."

While Miller did end up making it through her ceremony in September, she did so while suffering the effects of the toxic plant she'd picked: According to the Nova Scotia Museum, snow-on-the-mountain's sap is the most toxic element of the plant — which is unfortunate, considering every single part of snow-on-the-mountain contains sap. "Even dried plant materials retain their poisonous properties," the museum says in its Poisonous Plant Patch information center.

Miller told PEOPLE that when she went to the hospital immediately following her ceremony, the doctors who treated her told her she "was lucky she didn't have permanent eye damage." She added, "I did my makeup myself and it kept dripping off because my eyes were watering so bad. I had black lines running down my face the whole time, but I didn’t care at that point because I was in so much pain."

According to the Nova Scotia Museum, the pain Miller suffered is a common result of contact with snow-on-the-mountain. Ingesting the plant will cause nausea and vomiting, but even handling it can cause skin rashes and eye irritation like Miller got, as well as blistering, the museum says. In cases where exposure is significant, snow-on-the-mountain can cause "intense burning of the mouth, throat, and stomach; uncontrollable salivation; convulsions; and sometimes, coma and death."

Miller thankfully didn't have the more serious effects, but she attended her reception wearing a pair of freshly bought pajamas courtesy of Jon, and "passed out" as soon as she and new husband Jon arrived at their hotel, PEOPLE reported.

When Harvey found out about their story, he decided to give them a second shot at a dream wedding and honeymoon. He invited the couple to be on his show, where he surprised them with a weeklong Disney Dream Wedding, including a honeymoon trip to Disney's Aulani Resort in Hawaii, and offered himself as the officiant for their do-over ceremony.

"It was so much more than we could've asked for," Miller tells Bustle of the experience. "Every single person we met was so kind towards us and seriously did everything they could to give us back a day that was kind of taken from us. Plus, I was able to see my husband while saying our vows which actually ended up making me cry! It was just simply amazing."

"I had just never heard of a wedding where the bride had to be rushed to the emergency room for having an allergic reaction to her bouquet and having so many bad things happen on their wedding day," Harvey told PEOPLE. "I really felt like they deserved another opportunity to celebrate and what better place to make it happen than Disney."

And in even more happy news, since their wedding and do-over ceremony, Miller announced that she and Jon are expecting their first child together in September. Congratulations, Christine and Jon!