The Tornado

As we all know the bible starts with Genesis 1:1 (NASB). "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
          Well in my beginning before I really started to look into who God, Jesus and this Holy Spirit were, my life had some serious problems.
It was 2015 and I had been married for 9 years. I just graduated Physician Assistant school in December of 2014 and I was going to have my 4th son in March 2015. My husband and I hadn't had the best marriage over the 9 years which we will talk about at a later date but we were doing o.k.
           May 2014 we had gotten orders to move from Arkansas to Illinois with the Air Force. I was so dreading this move more than anything. We had been in Arkansas for 7 years! We had our house, we had our churches, we had the boy's school, close aquaintances and maybe even some friends. We definitely had our roots planted. I was still in PA school and not supposed to graduate until December 2014. Well come May my husband went on to Illinois and I stayed back with our 3 boys and the house to continue to my graduation. Things were rough with my husband in Illinois but he'd come back when he could. I ended up having to pack the entire house with some help when he was home. I was already 7 months pregnant with our 4th son. My mother and brother came in December to help me in the end which was a big help considering I was getting very pregnant by then. December 14, 2014 came, I graduated with my Masters degree in Physician Assistant studies and I felt so accomplished. We then finished packing up the house we lived in since 2008 and in the beginning of January we said "Goodbye Arkansas." In the meantime of moving we had to decide what to do with our home. Were we gonna sell it, rent it etc. We had the house on the market from May until December when we left. We didn't get one bite. We decided to contact a realtor and put it up for rent. We finally got a renter in February 2015. We had to bite our tongues on what kind of renters we would allow because in all honesty we couldn't afford a rent payment in Illinois and our mortgage in Arkansas.
         Our first day in Illinois we got to get the keys and directions to the house we were going to rent for our tour in Illinois. I got to see it and look around. Then my husband took me to the train station where I left for 5 days for a PANCE conference in Schaumberg IL to help me do well on the exam before I could become and actual certified PA. The course went well and the next week I tested for PA Certification. I was notified by 15 January 2015 that I passed and was now able to apply for Illinois licensure. I was elated. However, I felt a lot of things going on emotionally. Yes, I was hormonal being pregnant etc but I specifically remember telling my husband one night while we were in the shower together that if this assignment didn't break our relationship I would be shocked. He told me that we would have to try really hard to not let it. My husband was a very faithful man. Able to give God anything. And to my amazement he did that 99% of the time. He is a very calm person. He wasn't the most affectionate man there was to me or our boys but he was still loving in his own way. The trials of Illinois started almost immediately with trying to find all my boys a school to go to that was not public. We had them in a Christian school since my oldest (Ethan) was 2 1/2 years old. This proved a significant challenge with the cost of living being so expensive in Illinois compared to Arkansas. So, we started them out at Holy Trinity Catholic School. Ty & Beau ended up having a very hard time adjusting to our new life and ended up having to be asked to leave the school. Being 7-8 months pregnant I wasn't going to continue to drive Ethan there and the other 2 somewhere else. So, the school search began and I dis-enrolled Ethan and Ty. The only option at this time was to enroll him and Ty in Scott Elementary school. Public school here we come. This was NOT my ideal option but I really had no choice since I wasn't working. Simultaneously I had made an OB appointment at the Scott Air Force Base OB clinic. The first appointment we went to the doctor was a young male who was very odd. He said some things that I would never say to a pregnant woman like, "Yeah having a baby just looks like it hurts." But I gave the clinic the benefit of the doubt and went back a 2nd time. This time I had to have my Group B Strep swab done. Now if you've never had this done it literally is a swab like a ginormous Q-tip that they are supposed to stick into the vagina swirl around and then go down to the anus give a poke and be done. So total maybe 25 seconds. Yeah that is SOOOOO not what this Nurse Practitioner did to me. She sat there and painted my vaginal lips for about 25 seconds and then poked my anus. After she left the room I told my husband that I was done. I said that swab is going to come back positive and I know I don't have Group B Strep. I haven't the past 3 times so I'm sure I don't have it now. Low and behold the test came back positive. I was on a mission to find an off base doctor. But, with the military if they won't let you do that then you have to change from Tricare Prime to Tricare Standard. I tried writing appeal letters and they still continued to not let me be seen off base without switching insurances. So here we go again. I switched my insurance to Tricare Standard. And every OB that I called did not want to take me. Delivery is the most liable time for the pregnant woman when the most can go wrong. Finally, I found a man in Swansea that reviewed my healthy pregnancy records and took me. I just kept feeling like I was being punished. Oh and not to mention this new assignment that my husband accepted... he was hardly home. From the time we moved to Illinois January 2015 until Luke was born March 2015, I think Jeremy was home for 10-15 days total. It was an absolute nightmare. And being new to Illinois, I had no family, no friends, no nothing. It was me and my boys and Jeremy when he was there. It wasn't going well for me mentally. Also, while all this was happening, remember that house in Arkansas that we were renting? Yeah the renters decided that they were just not gonna pay. So we got 2-3 months rent that didn't even cover the mortgage and they just stopped paying. Well, before Luke came we made a surprise visit to our house because we had gotten some tips from our good neighbor friends that the people had 2 dogs which they were only allowed to have 1, amongst other things. The people were nice but they had already ruined carpets and their dogs had ruined the screens out back. I was so upset. And if the this wasn't awful we ended up having to do a deed in lieu of foreclosure. We ended up voluntarily giving our home back to the bank because we couldn't pay for it. The renters also stole our back patio set too. Life was a messed up roller coaster and I really wanted to get off.
           March 2015 came and we welcomed our beautiful baby boy Luke into the world. His brothers were so happy to meet him. Jeremy stayed home for about a week and then away he went again. I was alone again to wake boys up, make sure they got on the bus, get them off the bus, make lunches. Now don't get me wrong, I am prior military so I knew what to expect being a military wife. But this was just too much for me to handle at this time with everything else. I felt like my life was caving in.  But little did I know in the years to come it would get a whole lot worse...