I was born in the infancy of the disco era... therefore the first decade of my life is pretty much a waste of 10 years with a little plaid thrown in.
My teenage years were during the years of big hair and power ballads... so I had long hair, played in cheezy cover bands and wore the occasional parachute pants. Add a little guyliner and a lot of hairspray and you have the embarrasing decade of my life.
Enter the '90s. I joined the Army in 1989 which sent me to Germany and Oklahoma for the next four years of my life. The is the time when I met the girl of my dreams, Angie, while I was home for my 21st birthday. Fifteen months later I had myself a wife. Fast forward another couple of months and we were pregnant. My first daughter was born November 9, '94 at Offutt AFB, NE. We left the Army in 1995. Spent a few years working a lot of jobs (Cab driver, insurance fraud examiner, dry-cleaning delivery guy, etc) for a little money and going to school. Decided to go back into the Army in '98. This time Uncle Sam sent us to California for training and Texas for more schools. We packed up the car again in 2000 and moved to Louisiana. Took a little side trip to Afghanistan, Cuba and a few other holes in the wall. 2002 we all loaded up in a plane to move back to Germany.We were in Germany from 2002-2005 and we had our second daughter, Katerina, there in November 2004. Katerina made us a family of four. With that mission accomplished we came back to the U S of A to be stationed in Arizona. I taught at an Army school while we were in Arizona and in October 2006, we had our third girl, Bianca.Bianca was born with an extremely unusual condition of not having a pituitary gland. Now when I heard that, all I could remember is that the teacher said something about a pituitary gland during sex ed. Turns out that this particular gland controls all kinds of things. You can't live without it unless someone does everything on a daily basis that the pituitary normally does. That someone is my wife and I, and our oldest daughter helps out quite a bit too. It is a 24 hr. job that requires us to monitor her all the time and pick up on symptoms that require us to increase some medicines or administer others or give emergency shots or.... well the list goes on. Bianca has already survived some pretty close calls. We've all gotten WAY to familiar with Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Units. We are all together now in our home. The biggest part of our lives has become providing the care and treatment needed to ensure Bianca doesn't become another bad statistic. She will be the GOOD statistic that shows how a baby can make it through this crap. There is a lot of garbage that goes along with her care that I won't go into here. Needless to say it has all increased our stress levels about one million percent. We have met some amazing people on this journey with Bianca. One particular nurse in Tucson helped us through the hardest part of our lives. My boss in Arizona; I knew he was a good guy before everything blew up, but he turned out to be much more than I had guessed. Instead of "just an old boss", he is now someone I will never forget. Bianca's heart surgeon - UNBELIEVABLE woman. She was operating on other people's babies while her own was in the very same ICU. I saw her every day with a watery glaze over her eyes while she held her baby. I had no idea she was a doctor spending her breaks with her baby between surgeries, surgeries she knew her own child would soon have to endure.The military turned out to be the best employer I could have had during all this. They gave me the time off I needed to be with my family, and when the immediate danger was over they moved me back to my hometown so we could have help from the rest of our family. My new bosses are just as compassionate as the bosses I had in Arizona.It's good timing I guess. A few years back, I remember begging my boss to let me take some of my 90 days of vacation I had saved up so I could take care of some really big problems before everything went to hell. The asshole said "No, not one day!" Everything eventually did go to hell -- having a terrible impact on my family / coworkers / my job and myself. Thank god that moron had nothing to do with me when Bianca was born with all her troubles. No doubt he would of said "Suck it up, you can always have another kid if this doesn't work out."The military can be rough sometimes. It nearly cost me my life and my family in the past, but it absolutely saved everything for me this time.I guess that's my life story. I've burned any remnants of plaid that may have been in my childhood closet. I still listen to cheezy hair bands, but don't do guyliner or pleather and I'd do anything for the four girls in my life.
