Dr. James Ian Geller snapped a photo of a glass of beer, the beach and a Cincinnati Bengals-Kansas City Chiefs football game on TV the evening he arrived at La Jolla Shores Hotel in La Jolla, Calif., in February 2022, and posted it on Facebook.
“This is the way to watch the game,” he wrote, alongside the photo, which caught Bibianne Uychinco Fell’s attention instantly.
Starting the next day, Dr. Geller, 55, a pediatric oncologist specializing in liver and kidney tumors, would host a three-day national pediatric tumor conference at the hotel.
A year earlier, he led a pediatric liver team that saved Ms. Fell’s younger daughter’s life at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio, where he was a clinician and researcher, and until recently conducted research remotely.
Her daughter, at age 4, was diagnosed with a high-risk liver cancer, and has been cancer-free for four years. Ms. Fell, 45, who goes by Bibi, also has two teenage daughters; all are from previous marriages.
“He’s in my city, what are the chances?” Ms. Fell, who lives in San Diego County, recalled thinking and invited him out for a glass of wine via text.
Dr. Geller, who grew up in Mamaroneck, N.Y., also has three children and now works part time as a clinician and researcher at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Dartmouth and received a medical degree from Tel Aviv University in Israel.
“I thought he was brilliant, compassionate and really making a lot of difference to kids worldwide,” said Ms. Fell, who separated six months earlier from her husband. Their marriage ended in divorce, as did a previous marriage.
On his third day in La Jolla, Dr. Geller texted to say he was free that evening.
“Was this a parent who wants to say thank you, or talk about research, or something else?” Dr. Geller recalled thinking. (He had been on the verge of a separation himself, and the next month moved into an apartment in Cincinnati.)
Ms. Fell, a lawyer, who runs a personal injury law practice, received a law degree magna cum laude from the University of San Diego School of Law, where she is an adjunct professor teaching trial advocacy. She graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California San Diego.
“I didn’t know if it was a date.” he said. “I didn’t know what it was.”
Over the next three hours, wine turned into dinner on the rooftop deck at George’s at the Cove, overlooking La Jolla Cove and the Pacific Ocean, where it was so chilly and windy that he gave her his Patagonia black fleece zip-up to warm up.
“I was enjoying myself and I didn’t want it to end,” she said. “I ordered a butterscotch gooey cake thing to prolong the meal.”
By the time she arrived home, he had sent her a long text.
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“It gave me butterflies,” Ms. Fell said, and a few days later they began texting, and then spent the next five or six weeks getting to know each other almost daily on the phone.
“I didn’t know how it would work so many states away,” she said. “I was willing to play it out.”
So was he, and in March he drove 12 hours from Cincinnati for their first date in New Orleans, where Ms. Fell was chairing a two-day conference of women trial lawyers.
They had a quick first kiss hello, and after joining her for a conference dinner that evening, one of her closest friends, whom she described as “one of the most vicious trial lawyers in the country,” grilled him.
“I already fell in love with him,” she said, and before they parted ways, he gave her the fleece Patagonia zip-up from their first evening together.
They then spoke multiple times a day and saw each other at least once a month somewhere in the world, including conferences in New York; Marseilles, France; and British Columbia, Canada.
“Distance, kids,” he said. “Nothing about it was going to be easy, but it definitely felt right.”
In February 2024, as the sun set and they had danced to songs by Jason Mraz, Dr. Geller proposed at his lake house in Norris Lake, Tenn., near Knoxville. (Their divorces had been finalized a few weeks earlier.)
In early spring 2024, he officially moved into her house in North County, San Diego, nicknamed “Dorm North” since their six children and nephew (now living there) come and go, and sometimes hang out together.
On June 20, the busy couple got around to a no-frills legal ceremony officiated by Arlene Lozano, a clerk, at the San Diego County Clerk’s Office in San Diego.
“We got the big pieces in place,” she said, when they exchanged vows in a wedding celebration six months earlier at Kaimea Estates, a waterfront venue in Oahu, Hawaii, before 35 guests.
That sunny afternoon, amid Hawaiian breezes, guests enjoyed a menu prepared by Chai Chaowasaree, known as Chef Chai, and the bride’s mother, who lives in Hawaii, danced a hula as a gift to the couple.
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