Alexandra Walsh and Dr. Ben Nguyen forged a connection after being paired as a team of volunteer E.M.T.s. Years later, they started to date.
Long before Alexandra Christine Walsh, a physician assistant, and Dr. Ben Anthony Nguyen were joining other health care professionals on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus, the two were a dynamic duo helping to save lives for the Branchville volunteer fire company in College Park, Md.
Dr. Nguyen was already a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical technician with the company when Ms. Walsh began serving as a volunteer E.M.T. in 2011. Soon after, they were paired together as a team of E.M.T.s who were affectionately referred to as “Nugget and Walsh” by firehouse personnel.
Ms. Walsh, 30, said that she and Dr. Nguyen, 33, started out as friends going on emergency calls together, “and eventually, something really wonderful developed between us.”
“What I loved most about Ben from the very beginning was that he was a very good listener, and he never seemed to get upset,” she added. “He has always preferred talking things through.”
Said Dr. Nguyen, “I found out right away that Alexandra was a very caring and genuine person.” Their early days working together as E.M.T.s, he added, led him on a path to pursuing what are now the two most meaningful things in his life: Ms. Walsh and his medical career.
Dr. Nguyen graduated from the Catholic University of America, where he also earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. He received a medical degree from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York. A graduate of the University of Maryland, Ms. Walsh received a master’s degree in physician assistant studies at James Madison University.
In 2014, three years after they met, the two officially became a couple. In 2016, when Dr. Nguyen began medical school, they began a four-year period of dating long-distance, which ended in 2020 soon after the pandemic set in.
That March, Dr. Nguyen was preparing to finish medical school when the emergence of the coronavirus prompted the cancellation of the rest of his classes. He used his free time to help care for patients at SUNY Downstate Hospital, where he is now a senior resident physician. Two weeks after he started helping out at the hospital, Dr. Nguyen got Covid.
He then left his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to stay with Ms. Walsh in Harrisburg, Pa., where she was working at a hospital and had recently begun helping to admit Covid patients. He lived with her for about two months — at first, they stayed in separate bedrooms — before the two moved back to his place in Brooklyn together.
“It was challenging for both of us,” Dr. Nguyen said of that time.
“She was very understanding and caring,” he added of Ms. Walsh, who now works in the interventional radiology department at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. “She never held anything against me. All she ever did was take care of me.”
They became engaged in October 2020, after he proposed to her on the Brooklyn Bridge to a soundtrack of honking horns and catcalls from passing cyclists. To get to the bridge, they rode the subway to Downtown Brooklyn. “During the entire train ride there, Ben kept one hand over the same pocket,” Ms. Walsh said. “I kind of knew something was up.”
The couple were married April 22 at Holy Family St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Brooklyn before the Rev. Rafael Perez, a Roman Catholic priest, and 120 guests, whom they required to be vaccinated.
Among the attendees were the groom’s parents, Hoang-Oanh Nguyen and Thu Nguyen of Silver Spring, Md., both of whom immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Also present were the bride’s parents, Joan Walsh and Michael Walsh of Vienna, Va.
“Ben and I have had so many wonderful days together,” the bride said a few hours after marrying the groom.
“But nothing tops today,” she added. “Today is the best day of them all.”
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April 29, 2022 at 11:00AM
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Coupled by Chance, Then by Choice - The New York Times
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