The version of how they met differs. First, there’s Lydia’s version. “I was a college student at Texas Tech, Ted was stationed in the Air Force, but he was still going to the college class because that’s where the girls were.” However, Ted disagrees. “It was the college and career class, and she came up and pinched my butt and asked me out!” “That never happened,” laughs Lydia.
The two dated briefly before the remaining three and half years of their relationship became long distance when Ted was stationed in Florida. “We communicated and talked a lot… we wrote letters; there was no email, no Skype, no Twitter,” said Ted, “but eventually I moved to Tinker and we got married.”
Ted was deployed to the first Iraq war and was stationed in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. “I hated him being gone,” remembers Lydia. “Military wives are strong women, and frankly, I didn’t think I could do it.” Fortunately, for Lydia, Ted chose not to re-enlist. Instead, he went to law school, and they started a family. “It was chaos like any family with three young children…we both worked full time…it was busy, but a good time,” said Lydia.
However, the young family was about to get a blow when Lydia and Ted noticed that threeyear- old Nick was jaundiced and had a swollen abdomen. “We were sent to a liver specialist, and they started to do a surgery, but then they ran another test and took us into a room. The doctor told us that Nick had stage four neuroblastoma, it’s a rapidly growing cancer of the nervous system,” explained Ted.
Lydia adds, “I screamed. You could hear me down the hospital hallway. You don’t think of your baby getting cancer… it was horrifying. I said, ‘Okay, let’s get it out’ and they said, ‘We can’t, it’s inoperable.’ So we tried several rounds of chemotherapy, two stem cell transplants, and radiation, but nothing worked. Through some research, we found a surgeon in New York City who would try to remove the tumor. This time the surgery was partially successful, but a portion of the tumor still remained.”
All of the treatments available in Oklahoma had been exhausted, so Lydia and Ted took Nick to Philadelphia where the additional treatments succeeded. Nick has survived eight years, and has had no evidence of disease for three. “When you have a child that’s sick, it throws the balance of your marriage off,” said Lydia. “It drew us close because we prayed together and shared a common struggle. It’s odd to say, but it was also a good time. We had fun with Nick and grew together as a family, we grew closer to God, and we learned to enjoy each day because you truly don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”