2020. What a year. Honestly this was the hardest year of Tyler and I’s life thus far. It’s crazy to go from having one of the best years of your entire life in 2019 to the actual worst in 2020. But it wasn’t all bad and honestly thank goodness for family and good friends because they made all the difference in an extremely dark time for us. But I’ll start with some of the good things that happened! First off, one of my photos was chosen as the cover for Utah Valley Bride Magazine! This has been a goal and dream of mine for years and I can’t believe it actually happened! I’m still on cloud 9 from this achievement!! Tyler and I also were able to go to St. George+California on a little trip as well as Disney world for a couple days (we were supposed to be in Hawaii with friends but I’ll get to that in a minute haha) This year was also one of the best years of my business so far which is CRAZY because it was during a pandemic. I’m so incredibly blessed to have had the year I had business-wise when I know so many people truly struggled and lost their businesses and careers. I truly look at it as a tender mercy in a year full of grief and pain. Tyler also killed it in all of his classes for his masters degree! He’s currently in his last semester and I’m so proud of him for putting in so much hard work with school and work while so much crap was going on around us.
Some other happy things! Ryan came home from his mission in Spokane Washington!! It was so amazing to welcome him home! Best day ever!! I missed my brother so much and it’s been a blast having him home even if he did have to come home to a pandemic haha.
Now for the ugly. This year started off with a bang by my facebook business page being hacked by some people in Indonesia and stealing $7000 from us. It was one of those moments of sheer panic and disbelief. What do you even do in that situation?? We were finally able to figure it out and get our money back but holy crap it was so scary. Tyler also started the year off with a set-back at work that crushed our spirits. Little did we know that it would get much worse at his job before it got better but I’ll get to that. Then we got some amazing news. We had been trying to get pregnant for a year and we were about to start chatting with a fertility specialist when I found out that I was PREGNANT!! Disbelief was an understatement! Neither Tyler and I could believe it! We had so much fun telling our families and soaking in the little moments. Unfortunately I started experiencing some bad abdominal pain and after a trip to the emergency room and a blood test I found out that I was miscarrying at 6 weeks. It was horrible, painful, and a nightmare. I was severely unprepared for the pain of miscarriage and I’m upset no one talks about what actually happens when you miscarry because it was truly traumatizing. I will forever miss our October baby and the feeling of loss was indescribable. You just feel so empty. I truly have the best friends and family in the world. The outpouring of love and service we received after the miscarriage was incredible. We truly felt the love of our savior through other people dropping off flowers, treats, dinners and my mom coming over to just be with me.
Right after our first miscarriage the pandemic hit hard as well as the earthquakes. I think we can all agree March and April were the weirdest scariest months. I don’t know about you guys but I still feel phantom quakes and my 72 hours kits are in our coat closet ready to go hahaha. After the miscarriage we started our fertility journey at Utah Fertility Center. We did a couple rounds of clomid with no success and our doctor recommended going straight to IVF. Oh my gosh I knew IVF would be hard but I think I underestimated how hard it would actually be. I was an idiot and did our first round of IVF right in the middle of wedding season during my busiest time of year. If I could go back in time I would wait until the summer was over because it was horrible. 40 shots later my egg retrieval landed on the same day as a bridal shoot and if you’ve ever done IVF you know that dates cannot be changed and if you’ve ever been a wedding photographer you know that bridals are the hardest session to reschedule. So I ended up having my egg retrieval in the morning and then photographing a session later that evening in agonizing pain. But what can you do.
We did a fresh transfer 5 days later and to our surprise again I GOT PREGNANT! I was on cloud nine. We were so ridiculously happy! Unfortunately the blood test came back with lower numbers than desired and they told me to prepare to miscarry again. The miscarriage was due to an unviable embryo. We decided to do the fresh transfer instead of waiting and paying for the genetic testing to test the embryos. We paid to do the testing after the miscarriage and we found that only 2 of our 8 embryos were viable. It was like a punch in the gut. So if we hadn’t done the testing we could have had 5 more miscarriages. I wish I could go back in time and do the genetic testing before the transfer but we really didn’t understand the situation and the $3000 was daunting at the time.
Both my miscarriages were completely different from each other. The first one happened all at once and this second one happened over the span of a week. I was actually in the middle of a wedding when I miscarried and it was horrible. I remember praying to Heavenly father to just help me get through the wedding and to hold it together until I got home. Luckily I found the strength to push through it and continue with the wedding and the other weddings and shoots I had that week. All of it was horrible and painful. The adrenaline of my job numbed me. I didn’t have time to mourn the loss until weeks later. It was probably one of the most traumatizing things I’ve been through.
We knew we potentially wanted to have at least three kids so our doctor told us we needed to do a second round of IVF to be able to get all the embryos we wanted before just focusing on transfers. We began preparing for another round when I had a gallbladder attack. The pain was so unbearable that we rushed to the ER and a week later I was heading into surgery to get my gallbladder removed because of a giant gallstone. My doctor explained that the pregnancies, miscarriages and all the changes in hormones were probably the reason for the gallstone. The thing that bothered me the most was the fact that we would have to wait 6 weeks to do our next round of IVF. It was a huge set back for me. I had the surgery and everything seemed to have gone well. A week later my largest incision was refusing to heal and it had swelled and was bright red, it was very hard and full of liquid. I could barely move I was in so much pain and after shooting a wedding (I was still in my busy season, it was an actual nightmare) we went into the doctor and he told me that I had an infection. There was a 1% chance of this infection happening and I was in disbelief that it had happened. What followed was the worst thing that I’ve ever experienced. They gave me some numbing shots and told me to close my eyes as they sliced my stomach open to remove the infection and then fill the hole with gauze. The following three weeks I experienced the most severe pain as I had to remove the gauze from the wound every morning and Tyler had to re-stuff the hole. The first time we did it, I almost passed out from the pain and told him that that must be what torture feels like because the pain was indescribable.
After I had fully healed from the surgery and infection we prepped for our second round of IVF. 40 shots, an egg retrieval, and some genetic testing later we ended with 8 viable embryos. We were at Disneyworld when we found out the news and we were ECSTATIC! Speaking of Disneyworld haha. We were originally supposed to be in Hawaii with our best friends Jordan and Alissa. But because of Covid and how hard the process was to get over there, Tyler’s Covid test came back POSITIVE and we couldn’t get another test in time (he didn’t have covid, we did a test at a hospital the next day that came back negative. But Hawaii only takes covid tests from 2 locations in Utah and you have to make an appointment like a week in advance) so we were out of luck and couldn’t go on the trip. It was right after our round of IVF and we had been looking forward to the trip SO badly as a time to relax and let go with friends. It was devastating. But we decided to try to make the best of the situation and we changed our flight from Hawaii to Florida and we hit up Disneyworld instead! Before we left to Disney and while we were at Disneyworld we also got some bad news that two key people on Tyler’s team had decided to leave the company. This meant Tyler would be a one-man team pretty much with his side of work. He would be learning and taking over a couple people’s work. It was really daunting and stressful but he was able to do it like a champ and I’ve never been more proud. He’s one of the most hard working people I know!
A couple weeks before we left for Florida we got the news that my Grandpa had gotten Covid. One day he was fine at his house and then things escalating very quickly and he was moved to the hospital. Within a couple weeks he had passed away due to complications with Covid and his passing shocked us all to the core. I was able to chat with him on the phone the day before they intubated him and he seemed in good spirits. Little did we know that he would never wake up after that. The only thing that brings me peace about the situation was that he has now been reunited with my Grandma.
After returning home we started preparing for our transfer. You have to take hormones for 2-3 weeks (depends on the transfer date) and then 5 days before the transfer you have to do progesterone shots in your leg/butt muscle and then continue those for 10 days after the transfer until you find out if you are pregnant or not. Those shots hurt SO BAD. But you get used to them after a while. I have never reacted well to the hormones even from the very beginning. They make me exhausted, extremely anxious, break me out, make me have weight fluctuations and the estrogen makes a lot of my hair fall out which makes me really sad because I don’t have that much hair to begin with haha. We did our transfer and I had my blood test 10 days later on Christmas eve. We got the news later that day that the transfer had failed and I was not pregnant. Despite the news and crying for most of the day, we ended up having an amazing Christmas with our families. The embryo was an AB quality hatching embryo, and by all means it should have attached. I’m still not over it. We decided to move forward with another transfer in January believing that since I had already gotten pregnant twice, that maybe the odds just weren’t in our favor in December and that it would work this next time. So we prepared for the transfer and this transfer ended up being a nightmare. Long story short the transfer process is not an easy one and it took them 6 times to insert the catheter because my bladder was too full and then the embryo was RETAINED. Which meant that it had gotten stuck in the tube and they had to re-do the entire process and re-transfer the embryo after heading back into the lab to make sure it was ok. The nurse was trying to comfort Tyler and I saying that all the times she’s seen this happen, it was because the embryo was “sticky” and people have ended up pregnant afterwards. Well, we learned 10 days later that that transfer had failed as well.
In a way I thought I would be getting my October baby back with that transfer and when it failed it really did me in. Our path moving forward is to do a mock trial where you take all the hormones for the transfer but instead of transferring an embryo they biopsy your Uterus to see why the embryos aren’t attaching. This will happen in the beginning of March and then we’ll go from there. All I know is we have 6 more embryos waiting for us and even though it’s been difficult, we are hopeful and we know we will be parents. Before this last transfer I know that there were a lot of people who fasted and prayed for us. And I want you all to know that we truly felt love and comfort from that. Like I said, our family and friends have carried us through this. I have friends that check up on me constantly and family that drops everything to be there for us and I’ve never been more grateful. Even though there has been a lot of darkness lately, these moments have taught me how I want to serve and be there for others when they are going through hard times. It truly does make a difference. I know I’ve shared parts of our story but if anyone wants to know anything about IVF, message me because no-one really understands how physically and emotionally hard it is unless you’ve gone through it. And sometimes it helps to just talk to other people who have experienced it themselves. At least it’s helped me to chat and connect with others. As of right now I’m taking it a day at a time. Some days are filled with hope and some days are filled with sadness and tears. But I’m really grateful to have had Tyler by my side through all of this. Even though he’s been going through all this pain as well, he has lifted and carried me through the hardest and darkest of times. I love him so much and this has made us stronger than I ever thought we could be. We can do hard things.
Some other happier moments included Tyler’s brother getting engaged to his beautiful fiancé Isabelle and I’m so excited to have her in the Headlee fam. It’s going to be amazing! There were happy moments like driving around the canyon in the fall leaves, pumpkin picking, and dressing up as The Miser brothers for Halloween. Tyler learned to ski and picked it up WAY fast! I have never been more proud ha ha! We spent time with friends when quarantine lifted, did some golfing, shot a wedding in Las Vegas, read 12 books and had a lot of family time. 2020 had its ups and downs but I made a goal to live life to the fullest in 2021. I can’t control the timing of things no matter how much I would like to, but I CAN control what I do with the time that I have and I want to continue to grow, have adventures with Tyler and create fun memories. A family will come whenever it’s supposed to and I just need to trust in that. One of my biggest goals of the year was to have faith over fear. It’s easier said than done but we feel good about 2021 and as long as we have each other we can make it as amazing as we want it to be.
