In an amazing story of love and redemption, a Boston Marathon bombing survivor is going to marry her "guardian angel" - the firefighter who saved her life.
Roseann Sdoia, a Boston native, had gone to cheer on people taking part in the city's marathon in 2013 when a pressure-cooker bomb exploded near her.
After the bomb went off, firefighter Mike Materia used a belt as a make-shift tourniquet for her badly injured leg and held her hand, comforting her as she was rushed to a hospital.
"I asked him if I was going to die. And he told me that I was going to be OK, that I only had a flesh wound," she recalled.
Because of the severity of her injuries, Sdoia's leg had to be amputated. While she was recovering in intensive care, Materia visited her.
"I was probably not the nicest to him from the get-go. I was in pain. But now we laugh and blame it on the morphine," Sdoia told the New York Post. "He's seen me on my worst day."
While she was in the hospital, Materia remained by her side and helped her as she got back on her feet. She told the outlet that she began falling for the firefighter as he helped her - both emotionally and physically.
"In the hospital, my mom tried to set me up with him," Sdoia told the Post. "I knew I was starting to have feelings for him because he was so kind and caring. And he has an unbelievable smile."
The two began dating shortly thereafter, and last month, Materia proposed with the help of their dog, Sal, who was wearing a special engraved dog tag that read, "Mike wants to know . . . If you'll marry him."
"Sal means so much to both of us," she said. "It couldn't have been more romantic."
The couple now plans to have a small wedding in October or November: "I do feel that, in a sense, some things happen for a reason," Sdoia said, referring to Materia as her "guardian angel".
The couple plans to release a book in March entitled Perfect Strangers: Friendship, Strength, and Recovery After Boston's Worst Day.
Reads the book's Amazon description: "Perfect Strangers is about recovery, about choosing joy and human connection over anger and resentment, and most of all, it's about an unlikely but enduring friendship that grew out of the tragedy of Boston's worst day."
