#TeamDietrich - Julian & Amber

Julian and I met during our deployment in #Iraq. I was the supervisor at the Behavioral Health Clinic and one day he escorted a soldier in to be seen. It was an instant connection! And let him tell it, he knew from that moment that we would be together. We would talk to each other on the phone for hours or instant messenger. Because we weren’t both stationed at the deployed base, it was our only means of communication. We grew close very quickly and instantly became friends and promised we would always at least be that for each other; if nothing else.

He knew from that moment that we would be together.

I left Iraq months before he did and returned to Fort Hood, Texas where I was currently stationed. At that moment in his life, he had decided that having more children was something that he was not currently interested in. We agreed to remain friends but eventually lost contact with one another for a while.

Shortly after, I moved back to Georgia (where I am from) and started pharmacy school; which had been a lifelong dream of mind. One day, out of the blue, Julian emailed me and basically said that he had made the decision to have me in his life no matter what it took—even if it meant having more children. He quickly became supportive in my journey to finish pharmacy school. Soon after reconnecting, we became engaged and began to plan our lives together.

Six short months after our wedding I was diagnosed with MS, and he was more supportive than I could have ever imagined. He stayed with me day and night while I was in ICU. He prepared my food, fed me, bathed me, spoke up for me when I couldn’t speak for myself and never wavered in his promise to always love me no matter what. Even though the disease itself is very debilitating, I never suffered from doing normal things because I had him by my side.

When we began our journey to conceive, neither one of us ever imagined that we would face difficulty in this area. Julian had been blessed with children before, so we thought “Surely, it will be no problem for us to get pregnant.” And we couldn’t have been more wrong. After one too many miscarriages, we sought help at a fertility clinic following the advice from my OB/GYN. I was terrified, devastated--heck, any emotion you can think of. Julian was always calm and reassuring, pretty much the complete opposite of me.

This journey has brought us both closer to God and each other and I wouldn’t want to travel these roads with anyone except him.