Cassie Costantine spent the past 10 months tirelessly planning a wedding for her daughter Rose, who got engaged on Christmas Eve.
After contacting dozens of venues, the Ocoee woman found a perfect one for the desired fall wedding: It offered a gorgeous landscape, proximity to the groom’s family, and, importantly for an animal lover like her daughter, live animals.
But Costantine said her trip to Wisconsin for the Oct. 5 wedding turned into a trip to the hospital after a freak accident with a cow at the venue.
Now Costantine, who suffered fractures to her spine and neck and spent nine days in a Minnesota hospital, is facing surgery and an extensive recovery, and her daughter Rose Costantine-Stomberg is working to raise money to help pay for her mother’s care.
“It was supposed to be a night filled with laughter, dancing, and memories we’d cherish forever. But before the evening was over, tragedy struck,” Costantine-Stomberg wrote on the fundraising page for her mother at GoFundMe.
Her mother spent “this past year pouring every ounce of energy into helping plan my wedding, staying up late to make everything perfect,” and they were delighted the chosen venue had Highland cows, “three sweet, fluffy animals that everyone was excited to be around,” she wrote.
But when Costantine squatted down to pet one following the dinner reception “the cow basically came up and jumped on me, kind of like a dog would,” she said. “Its hooves went on my shoulders…it bent me forward…so when my face hit the ground, the cow just kind of like, walked over me.”
Cassie Costantine lies in a hospital bed after her injury at her daughter’s wedding. Her daughter Rose Costantine-Stomberg (right) and her younger daughter join her for a photo. (Courtesy of Costantine family)
Initially, she didn’t want to distract from the festivities and told her family she was fine. But she was in excruciating pain and eventually went to a hospital at her daughter’s insistence.
At the hospital, doctors diagnosed the fractures and then transferred her to another facility that could provide more advanced care.
“It was just like an absolute nightmare. I can’t move more than, like, 30 degrees, so I had to lay flat in just excruciating pain,” she said. “Every little thing that you don’t think about what you need help with. Now at this point, I was like, I need help with, which was humiliating.”
Costantine flew back to Central Florida with her husband, Joseph, on Monday. She was scheduled to have surgery Friday and then faces six-to-eight weeks in an upper-body brace and physical therapy.
Her husband, who works for a vacation ownership company, will be taking time off to take care for her. The couple also have a 12-year-old daughter.
Costantine-Stomberg said her parents would never ask for help, but her mother, who has survived cancer, deserves to recover from this injury without the added stress of huge bills.
“She’s always been the one to lift others up. Now she needs help getting through the hardest chapter of her life,” she wrote on GoFundMe. So far, more than $6,500 of the $16,000 goal has been raised.
Joseph Costantine is also a professional magician who once appeared with his wife in a magic act on the TV show America’s Got Talent. He currently performs once a week and intended to start performing three nights a week, but is now trying to decide how to proceed after his wife’s injury. He said Cassie was to start performing on stage with him again, but those plans are canceled for now.
Cassie Costantine said the outpouring of help from family, friends, their church community and strangers through GoFundMe has touched her heart.
“We really, really, unbelievably, like, are grateful and just are honestly speechless,” she said. “Huge blessing for our family.”