Drunken brides, rowdy guests and broken legs can cause any bride or groom to scream. No matter how much they’ve planned and preened, wedding planners and their clients often run into horrors on wedding days all year round.

From police showing up to retain an unwelcome ex to the wedding dress bursting at the seams, many types of disasters can haunt a couple’s union. Midwest wedding planners have shared some of their most disastrous stories and warned about the frequent mishaps that haunt brides and grooms.

Barb Krousey, owner of Barb’s Bridal & Wedding Services in Little Falls, Minn., had an outdoor ceremony as one of her first weddings.

A couple planned the wedding at their home. The day before the ceremony, the groom fixed the trim on the house and fell off of his ladder. He ended up with a broken ankle and a broken leg and was taken to spend the night in the hospital. With the groom in surgery, the bride desperately called Krousey to tell her the bad news and told her how worried she was that the wedding would be canceled.

However, they just decided to keep everything on task for the next day, Krousey said. Sure enough, the groom arrived in a cast ready to be wheeled down the aisle.

“He was all drugged up, he barely knew where he was,” Krousey said. “But the ceremony went on and the reception began with the first dance in a wheelchair. They’ve now been married for 13 years and have three children.”

Stories like Krousey’s prove that a happy ending is always possible, no matter how many calamities hit a wedding plan.

Another, more recent wedding planned by Krousey involved travel from the ceremony to the reception hall. The bride found out the day before that the reception facility had double-booked the event. She called Krousey in a panic.

Krousey calmed her down, found a supper club that they converted for the reception, ordered a dance floor and redesigned the layout and decorations. A sign was posted at the old place to direct other guests to the new location. During the whole situation, the bride was extremely upset and worried.

During one conversation, Krousey told her, “The important thing is that you’re getting married. This fiasco will just be a story to tell for years to come and the moral of that story will be ‘we got married.'”

Krousey, with six weddings to decorate that weekend, decided she could donate some time to help serve food at the couple’s reception. While she waited for the wedding party to arrive, a man in denim overalls was first to walk through the door.

“I’m here for my free drink,” he said.

Apparently, the bride and groom’s limo had broken down and the man had given them a lift to the reception hall. Krousey couldn’t believe it and waited for a frantic bride. The bride arrived, made a beeline to Krousey, gave her hug and asked, “Guess what?” Figuring she’d tell her about the limo breaking down, Krousey shrugged.

The bride replied, “We got married!”

While wedding planners can often save the day, some situations are just too out of control to prevent.

The most common problem for Brenda Lundorff of Bridal Boutique in St. Cloud, Minn., is brides insisting on ordering their gowns a size or two small since they plan to lose weight for the wedding.

“This obviously doesn’t always happen,” Lundorff said. “And they often try to blame us when it doesn’t fit.”

A bridezilla or two has also visited Wedding By Design boutique owner Melissa Alger. A young bride came into Alger’s Des Moines store wanting a strapless gown, but her mother insisted on sleeves.

“She locked herself in a dressing room, sat on the floor and bawled for an hour,” Alger said. “All while yelling profanities at her mother through the door.”

While the young bride may have been the worst of the bunch, Alger recognized that every bride is different and has a different set of priorities.

“Many girls are very organized and have it all settled weeks before the wedding,” Alger said. “And then you have the girls that are stopping on the way to the ceremony to pick up the dress.”

Krousey, Lundorff and Alger have been through many hectic scenes and seen many wedding plans gone awry. Stories range from having a bride get so drunk she ran into her own chocolate fountain, to a bride getting her wedding gown stolen out of her car while grocery shopping.

The moral of these horror stories is that the couple gets married at the end of the day and eventually has their happy ending.