Life right now is not how I imagined it would be…

For the past 9 years, my husband has been in medical school, residency, and now he’s finished up his fellowship in cardiothoracic anesthesia. It feels like such a mile marker in our lives to be finished with school/ training when that’s all we’ve ever known as a couple.

We met in college in Utah, got married, and went straight to Pennsylvania after graduating so that Jason could start medical school. After 4 years, we moved to North Carolina where we’d been for the last 5 years for residency and fellowship. It’s crazy to think that now he’s started a job in South Carolina! What a blessing to be done!

We’ve recently moved from Winston Salem NC to Spartanburg SC, and I’m so excited! It’s only a couple hours south from WS, which is awesome because I’ll be able to keep shooting weddings and portrait sessions in North Carolina and expand my business down into South Carolina. We closed on our new home in June (house tour coming soon!) and moved all our stuff from the old house to the new. Throughout end of June and all of July we were staying in an airbnb in Winston Salem while Jason had been finishing his fellowship.

When I say life right now is not how I imagined, I mean that when I thought of life post training, I expected to have kids already (which we don’t) and I expected that we would be starting our new adventure with our dog Boris (which we won’t).

I always thought it was interesting how most people who experience infertility don’t talk about it while they are going through it. I felt like I only ever heard about their struggles after the fact, like after they announced their pregnancy or after they gave birth. Then they’d share all about how hard it was trying to conceive but now they are an infertility success story with their cute little babe to show for it. Now that I’m going through that journey (ugh I hate that word) I totally understand why those people chose not to publically share about their infertility while actively going through it. It’s emotionally and often even physically draining to share about those struggles while going through failed treatment after failed treatment. Everyone is rooting for you, but you feel like you are continuously letting them down. It’s haaaarrrrd.

About 2.5 years ago, we started trying to get pregnant. Meaning we weren’t preventing anymore and we wanted to see what would happen. After about a year of trying off and on, we started tracking ovulation to find my fertile windows and REALLY ACTIVELY try to get pregnant. After 6 months of no results, I spoke with my OBGYN and got referred to a fertility clinic. After various testing, we got diagnosed with unexplained infertility… Meaning all our tests came back normal and there isn’t anything that they can find that is wrong. But yet we still aren’t able to get pregnant. Super frustrating.

Since then, we’ve done 3 IUI’s, and 2 rounds of IVF followed by egg retrievals (one which resulted in no embryos, and another that resulted in 2 embryos). We transferred one of the embryos in June.

Days before that transfer, our sweet dog Boris unexpectedly passed away while Jason and I were at a doctors appointment at the fertility clinic. We’d only been gone for 90 minutes, but came home to him curled on the floor. When he didn’t respond to our calls, we rushed over to him only to find that his heart had stopped. That was the most painful and heartbreaking moment of my life. He had been my constant throughout my whole infertility process, and now he was gone..

I hoped that in all the grief and the heartache of losing him, there might be some good news of a pregnancy after years of disappointment. But alas, 9 days after the embryo transfer, we got a negative pregnancy test… Needless to say, June was a very sad month.

July was a month of healing. Healing from the loss of Boris (although I still have a good cry almost daily because I miss him so much). I still go on our daily walks every morning, sometimes alone and sometimes with Jason. It’s a chance to remember Boris and the literally hundreds of walks we did together.

I’ve also been focusing more on exercising and reading books that make me smile. In between photography sessions while I was still living in WS, I’d been driving down to Spartanburg a couple times a week to unpack, clean, and organize the new house.

Jason and I also recently celebrated our wedding anniversary. 12 years! I’m 32 now, so you can do the math on how young we were, ha!

And that’s life right now! We’re settling down in Spartanburg before resuming the next steps regarding our fertility and our future in South Carolina.

XO Hillary