Denver ? The Atlanta lawyer quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to fellow airline passengers in an interview aired Friday and insisted he was told before he set out for his wedding in Europe that he was no danger to anyone.

“I’ve lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way. It’s awful,” Andrew Speaker, speaking through a face mask, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” from his hospital room in Denver.

Meanwhile, questions arose as to whether the wedding even took place. The mayor of the island of Santorini in Greece, Angelos Rousso, told The Associated Press: “There was no wedding. They came for a marriage but they did not have the required papers.” He said the couple stayed in a hotel for three days and then left.

In Denver, Speaker’s doctors said that he could be in the hospital for up to two months, and that if antibiotics fail to knock out the extremely drug-resistant infection, he may have to undergo surgery to remove infected lung tissue, about the size of a tennis ball.

Surgery to remove pieces of the lung was more common before the advent of sophisticated drugs in the 1960s. But it is coming back as a treatment because of the development of strains resistant to those drugs.

Speaker is the first infected person quarantined by the U.S. government since 1963. In the TV interview, Speaker, wearing street clothes, repeatedly apologized to the dozens of airline passengers and crew members now anxiously awaiting the results of their TB tests.

“I don’t expect for people to ever forgive me. I just hope that they understand that I truly never meant to put them in harm,” he said, his voice cracking.

Health officials have contacted 74 of the 310 U.S. citizens who were on the May 12 Air France flight that Speaker and his fiancee took to Paris, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That count includes all 26 who sat in the five-row area around Speaker – the ones considered at greatest risk.

None is exhibiting symptoms, CDC officials said.

Speaker, 31, said he, his doctors and the CDC all knew he had TB that was resistant to some drugs before he flew to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon last month. But he said he was advised at the time by Fulton County, Ga., health authorities that he was not contagious or a danger to anyone.

Officials told him they would prefer he didn’t fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said. Speaker said his father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting.