Uplifting Story - Bring Hope to your Life!

It is a 5 minute video, I know the article below is a little long, I just would like for you to read it! Thank You everybody who has shown support! 

             This is the story of how my wife and I met, which is a very "WWII-esque" story. We met through letters while I was deployed overseas fighting for our country. She is a 3 time cancer survivor, and I am a 2 time combat veteran, this is our story below and our wedding video above. I hope everyone enjoys it.

By Jeff Jardine

On what promises to be a warm and spectacular day in July, Kristen Taylor and Nick Cameron will say their "I do's" outdoors at a hotel in Lodi.

She'll walk up the aisle to a flower-covered archway where Cameron and the minister await.

It's a moment that should have occurred 365 days earlier or, if insurgents in Iraq had had better aim, never at all.

Because even though Taylor and Cameron aren't yet married, they've already endured enough fear, setbacks, heartbreak and tensions together to last a lifetime. But nothing has dampened their love for each other or their enthusiasm for their future.

They've coped with the death of his brother, who was in the Marines. And Nick Cameron saw death and destruction while serving tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She is fighting melanoma, which began with a single mole and has returned twice. She's had two surgeries, including one that caused the couple to postpone their scheduled July 2006 wedding one year.

They waded through Cameron's readjustment to civilian life after he mustered out of the Army in 2004.

Through it all, they discovered they were meant to meet, to date, to fall in love and to be married - life's obstacles be damned.

Here's their story: Taylor graduated from Johansen High in 1999, the same year Nick Cameron graduated from Beyer. Both participated in speech competitions, but never against each other.

Cameron attended California State University, Monterey Bay, dropped out after his freshman year, and enlisted in the Army.

Taylor went on to Chico State and began working toward her teaching credential. She taught at Modesto High before joining Johansen's staff, where her mother, Yvonne Taylor, and Cameron's mom, Marcia Cameron, teach.

In October 2001, 22-year-old Marine Cpl. Jeremy Cameron - Marcia's son and Nick's brother - was killed in a training exercise at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. Taylor accompanied her mother to Jeremy's funeral in Modesto.

As the only surviving son, Nick Cameron said, he was given the option of leaving the Army ahead of schedule.

"But I wanted to finish (his commitment), to do what's right," he said.

A few months later, he shipped out to Afghanistan, serving with Bravo Company in the 3rd Battalion, 505th Infantry Regiment. When he returned in September 2003, his mother staged a welcome-home party. She took the week off to prepare. Taylor, now doing her student teaching, substituted that week.

Marcia Cameron invited her and others in the English department to the party, and that is where Taylor formally met Nick Cameron.

"I was there for maybe 10 minutes because I had a blind date," she said. "But I still remember what he was wearing: a 'Hard Rock Cafe, Bagram, Afghanistan' shirt. It was a joke."

Cameron returned to his base at Fort Bragg, N.C., when his leave ended and learned from watching TV that his unit would soon head to Iraq.

At Marcia Cameron's request, Taylor began writing letters to Cameron.

"I started writing once a week, then twice a week," she said. "Just mundane things that happened. I didn't want to write anything heavy, considering what he was going through over there."

She was hired to teach freshman English at Modesto High and required each of her students to write a 'Dear Soldier' letter.

"I passed them out to soldiers who didn't get much mail," Cameron said.

Military mail being what it is, he'd get a stack of a dozen letters at a time. And while he frequently e-mailed or called his parents, he never wrote letters.

"I had no time," he said.

Then, he wrote one.

"One letter the entire time, and it was to me," said Taylor, who now teaches at Johansen. "I was dating a guy at the time, and I broke it off. It affected me. I concluded there might be something here."

On his final day in Iraq, though, Cameron's unit came upon an explosive device in the road. They stopped to check it out, and found themselves under mortar attack.

"I remember thinking, 'We've made it through all of this, and now we're gonna die,'" he said "That didn't happen, obviously."

He returned to Modesto on Memorial Day 2004, and Taylor invited him to speak to her classes.

For their first date, he took her to Papapavlo's Mediterranean restaurant in Modesto.

"It turned into a five-hour lunch," Taylor said.

They discovered his Beyer High debate team partner, Amanda Heiner, had been Taylor's best friend growing up. They had other common friends as well.

"We had all these connections," she said.

Learning he's a die-hard Giants fan, she bought him tickets to a game at AT&T Park. She didn't know his parents were season ticket holders, but he played the role of the good soldier.

"I didn't say anything that my parents' seats were better than hers were," Cameron said.

They now were officially dating. Cameron, who became a real estate salesman, soon suggested they buy a home together, and it was clear they were headed toward an engagement. She agreed on the condition that she had a ring on her finger within six months, and he came through as promised. He proposed at Papapavlo's, where they had their first date, and they planned a July 2, 2006, wedding.

Not so fast.

Back in May 2002, while getting ready to graduate from Chico State, Taylor noticed that a mole on her left leg had started to change. She went to a doctor, who wanted her to see a dermatologist. But her insurer at the time considered it cosmetic and refused to pay to have it removed, she said. So the other doctor took it off at the surface and, though it was malignant, told her she had a 1 percent chance of having it return.

Four years later, she noticed a lump on her hip. Doctors at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center removed 28 lymph nodes from her left hip and groin. Only one was cancerous, but they started her on chemotherapy.

Her father, retired Modesto police detective Ray Taylor, went to every appointment with her. The cancer tested Cameron, who gave her shots in her stomach.

"I always felt the need to do more," he said. "I didn't know what to do."

He felt he needed to be stoic and strong, as his military training dictated.

"I tried to be positive reinforcement," he said. "I never wanted to cry. I wanted to be strong for her."

She needed him to be less Army and more fiancé.

"We had some tense moments," Taylor said. "I needed to talk about my mortality. If I did, I could get it out."

The cancer returned seven months later, this time in her spleen. Because the body can live without the spleen, she wasn't considered terminal. So she had it removed in the fall of 2006 and has been cancer-free since.

There are caveats: She's still considered a Stage IV melanoma patient. And she's gone from having a 1 percent chance of having the cancer again - as was the case after having the first mole removed - to an 80 percent chance it will return at some point in life.

"I'm OK with it," Taylor said. "I've accepted that it's part of my life.

She'll need to go five years without a recurrence to be considered in remission, and if the disease returns, she won't be able to have children.

Yet these two young people forge ahead smiling, grateful to have each other.

Yes, they should have gotten married a year earlier than their new July 1 date. But considering what they've endured in such a short time together, they'll take it.