I'm a dad! Welcome the world's newest Rockets fan!

This is going to be a long post, so skip down to the TL;DR if you don't care about my sappy story . It's very personal, but Clutchfans is like an extended family to me, so I want to share it.

Spoiler

My wife and I have been trying to conceive for almost 10 years. We're high school sweethearts and got married back in 2001, with the expectation of starting a family soon. Needless to say, after trying for a while we realized that something was wrong and went to get checked out. They eventually discovered that we both had some issues, with mine being the more serious of the two. They found that I have something called a balanced chromosome translocation, in which parts of 2 of my chromosomes broke off and attached to each other. I'm otherwise healthy, but it causes big problems when trying to conceive. We soon learned getting pregnant naturally wasn't going to be in the cards for us, and that IVF would be our only option.

I was lucky enough back then to have insurance coverage for IVF (an unfortunately rare thing among providers), so we dove right in for our first IVF cycle back in 2003. We were young, naaive, and thought for sure it would work. Obviously it didn't, and we were crushed. Not only did the cycle fail, the doctors said things looked so bad that even IVF would be a longshot for us, so we should consider other options if we really wanted to have kids. Those other options would be either adoption, or using donor sperm, both of which we would consider very seriously over the years.

Infertility puts a strain on relationships that is unimaginable. It's heartbreaking to have doctor's shatter the dream you've had your entire life of starting a family. The stress that this put on our marriage was the major contributor leading to us getting divorced in 2006. That's a long enough story for a whole other post, but we spent a couple years apart and eventually found our way back to each other. In 2010, we married each other for a 2nd time.

Last year in March of 2012, we decided we were to the point that we wanted to try IVF again. We were living in Austin then, and found a new doctor and a fresh sense of optimism. We went through our 2nd cycle, which was another failure and we got to experience the heartbreak all over again. This doctor also told us it wasn't going to happen, and that we should move on. She said we could try again, but don't expect different results. Soon after that we decided as a couple to try 1 more cycle of IVF. We were sure it would fail, but we needed one more try in order to move forward with the other options of starting our family. We went into our 3rd cycle in August of 2012, highly cynical with no hope of success. We only had 1 embryo to transfer, and it was really poor quality and the lab gave it their lowest grade and very little chance of implantation. As you might have guessed, it worked .

Last night at 11:54 PM my wife gave birth to our daughter, and I still can't quite believe that this is real. Our little girl is great, mom is great, and we can't wait to start our life together.

Please join me in welcoming to the world our little girl, Ms. Olive Marlowe Harrison.

TL;DR After years of struggling with infertility, my daughter was born last night!