Where It All Started

Winston's promotion to Captain

When I first created this blog in April, I intended it to be a place for people to check out pictures of Winston's and my adventures while living in Italy. In my head I had this vision. I was going to become one with the Italian culture and I was going to sit at cafes drinking cappuccinos and writing my blog. My first post was going to be pictures of my newly decorated Italian home. My next post was going to be the fabulous baby moon cruise that Winston and I were planning on taking through the Mediterranean. We all have our visions, right? How we imagine life is going to go.  Let me restate that, how we want life to go. For those of you who know me well, you know I like to be in control.  Who doesn't though? As a Christian, it is a daily struggle for me to hand control over to God. Well, when I first married Winston, I knew that God was going to work on me because when you marry someone in the military, you have to learn that often times you are not in control. The Army (or whatever branch you are with) is now in charge. They tell you where you will live, when you will live there and for how long. They, like other jobs as well, will also tell you how much time you get to spend with your spouse. For those of you who know Winston, you might know that he doesn't deal with that well either.  He accepts some of it but he isn't one to just sit back and watch. If he can make something work for his better he will. His mom always says that things just seem to work out for him.  That is true to some extent but he also works really hard in the areas that he can to make sure things are in his favor. 

Vicenza, Italy

All that being said, when I found out I was pregnant with Addison in January, Winston and I had talked about maybe getting out of the military. He doesn't see it as a life long career and he would like to get into the business world before he is too behind to catch up. We were living in Lawton, Oklahoma at the time and were also dreaming of moving close to family and living in a real city, like Houston or Dallas. We agreed that the only way Winston would stay in the Army was if he got one of our top choices of places to live. Those places included Europe, Hawaii, and Savannah, Georgia.  Some might think those random but the first two were there for obvious reasons and the third was a place we could see ourselves really enjoying while still being close enough to home. Contradictory reasons but whatever. For anyone affiliated with the military, you might know that often times you aren't going to get what you want. Our top choices were a suggestion for branch but I never saw them actually giving us any of those places. I knew for sure that we were going to get somewhere we really didn't see ourselves being and we were going to get out. Shows me what little I know. A month (could have been a week or two but it felt like a month or four) or so after putting in our request, orders came out that we were going to be sent to Germany. What?! They actually gave us our TOP choice.  Well then a few weeks later they said just kidding, you're going to Italy! Like I said before, the Army is in control and you just have to listen. Well when all this happened, I was just a few months pregnant. I prayed, I thought, and I cried. It all sounded so cool. Who wouldn't want to live in Italy? But, I am super close to my family and I was going to be a having a baby so did we really want to move half way across the world? After the prayers, thoughts and tears, we decided we couldn't pass up the opportunity. Who knows if we would ever get the chance again and it was going to be such a growing experience for the both of us. Plus, it was going to be so cool! We left April 21st and embarked on our new adventure. 

Addison at 21 weeks

When we left, I was 20 weeks pregnant. Around 20 weeks, all women have an anatomy scan of the baby to make sure they are growing properly and that nothing is wrong. I knew when we left I needed to get one scheduled ASAP once I got there. So I got an appointment scheduled for May 7. We went in thinking it was just a routine thing and left unsure of exactly what was going on. The place we were sent to was great. Nice people, nice facility, etc. Only problem was that they didn't speak much English. That is all good and fine until they notice something isn't right with your baby and can't tell you exactly what they see because you don't speak the same language. After the sonographer spent about 25 minutes on her heart alone, and hadn't been saying "all normal" like he had for everything else, I knew something wasn't right. After he was done he came back with a google translation on his phone that said that he couldn't see all four chambers of Addison's heart and he wanted us to have a second opinion. He sent a write up to a doctor on post and we could talk to that doctor for more information. It was almost 6 PM by the time we left so it was going to be the next day before we were able to speak with anyone. That was one long night. 

The next afternoon when the clinic on post opened, we found the doctor that the write up had been given to.  His first question for me is do you want to keep this baby? Was it that bad? Did she have no chance at a normal life? He explained that the reason he asked that was because we were close to out of time by Italian law to terminate the pregnancy. Once we discussed that further and said there is no way we would terminate the pregnancy we moved on with options. He told us that we had an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist in Padua (about 30 minutes away) on Tuesday. Mind you, it was Thursday. Were we really going to have to wait until Tuesday to figure out what was going on? Lucky for us, he said if we could get over there in the next hour she could see us right away. It was slightly stressful getting there: we didn't know where we were going, we had a donut on our car so we couldn't drive it on the autostrada, and we don't speak Italian. We got decent directions, borrowed a car from an amazing couple we had met the day before, and with Google translate and gestures figured out the communication barrier. It helped that the cardiologist spoke very good English and had studied in the U.S. 

After a long echocardiogram on Addison's heart and a long discussion with the cardiologist we learned that Addison has a double inlet, single left ventricle with transposition of the greater arteries. Huh? We saw some diagrams and pictures but processing what we had just learned was a challenge I could never describe. We drove home from Padua with the knowledge that we are NOT in control and our lives had just been turned upside down. Where do we go from here?