“Despite the distance, I remain semper fi to my husband.”

Meet Casie. She is married to her infantry Marine, Daniel, and is a cat mom to her two kitties, Socks and Max. She went to Longwood University, a small university in an even smaller town of Farmville, VA. When she told me this I died because that’s where my brother went too! Daniel and Casie met while she was home from college for Christmas break; they are a Tindr success story!

While they were dating, they endured a six-month deployment to Bahrain. This time made them realize they wanted to get married, so they did just that with a sweet backyard ceremony three months after he returned. Due to the nature of the company he was in, he was called to deploy again 12 days after their wedding. Once he returned to the states, they moved down to Camp Lejeune together and began their life as a married couple.

She struggled finding a job in her field (history) without having to commute over an hour to Wilmington every day. This led her to change her career goals and she started the pharmacy technician program that is funded the MyCAA. I was pretty unfamiliar with how MyCAA worked, so she filled me in. She said first you pick a program. You then fill out an application and must get approved. After you are approved, you are able to receive a certain amount of money to go toward an educational program based off the rank of the Active Duty service member. The first part of Casie’s program is six months and based entirely online. After she completes the online portion, she completes an externship for a total of 160 hours. She then takes the boards because she has the knowledge from the online program and the practice from the externship. Lastly, if/when she passes the boards, she will receive her certificate to be a pharmacy technician. I highly encourage any eligible military spouses to see how this program could benefit them!

Their biggest challenge as a couple was when Casie was in the process of being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Before she was diagnosed, she was losing weight and very lethargic. After picturing a perfect, relatively easy life as compared to the back-to-back deployments they just endured, they were faced with a major illness to combat as a couple. It seemed like they couldn’t get a definitive answer from the Naval Hospital; they only received scary warnings of, “You may just not wake up one morning.” This was really scary for her, a military spouse, whose husband is often out in the field and was preparing to depart for a two-month course out of state. Instead of sitting by and letting that fear define their lives, she ended up going to an endocrinologist. The endocrinologist said her symptoms pointed to Type 1 Diabetes, prescribed insulin, and instructed her to adopt some new lifestyle changes, like counting carbs and drinking copious amounts of water. She has opened up about her experience on her blog: www.thetypeonediabetic.wordpress.com. Since her diagnosis in August 2017, Casie and Daniel have found their new normal, and are living the life they pictured when he first got back from his second deployment.