I’m walking into a four-story office building in Lone Tree, Colorado, surrounded by other office buildings. It’s somehow both exquisite and completely bland. There’s no life anywhere, which feels fitting for a place where so many people are desperately trying to create it.
The clinic occupies the third floor. Butterfly artwork covers the walls.
I’m taken back to the surgical area. A nurse pulls back the curtain to what I assume used to be an office cubicle and tells me to take off all my clothes, put on a gown and wait for the anesthesiologist. Friends had warned me he was a little kooky. They also mentioned he was from Michigan, so I figured we’d have something to talk about.
Looking back, I probably should’ve questioned why we had to bring a personal check made out directly to him for $300. Not a company. Not a medical practice. Him. But fertility has a funny way of making strange things feel normal. What was one more bizarre stop on the ride?
This 50-something man walks in while I’m sitting in an office recliner wearing nothing but a gown. My wife hasn’t joined me yet. We start talking about Michigan, as Michiganders always do, until somehow the conversation shifts to his recent trip to the Philippines.
Without prompting, he launches into a story about the Donald Trump shirt he wore there — guns, freedom, American flags — the whole package. According to him, everybody loved it.
I gently remind him that I’m there with my wife. Wife. Carbondale. Colorado. I figure maybe he’ll connect a few dots and realize we’re probably not on the same political wavelength.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he keeps going. Taxes. Student loans. Housing. Guns. Then back to the medication he’s about to push through my IV that will knock me out for fifteen minutes.
My anxiety is through the roof.
Finally, I interrupt and tell him, “I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.”
Right then my wife walks in. I shoot her a desperate look that clearly says, “Get me the hell out of here.”
She misses it.
A few minutes later I walk into the procedure room with my new best friend, black out for fifteen minutes, and remember nothing else.
That was just one of my egg retrievals.
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is already surreal. Somehow that interaction made it even stranger.
Carly and I began trying to have children in 2023. Here we are in the second half of 2026, and we’re still waiting.
If fertility had a language, I speak it fluently now.
Seven attempts at Intrauterine Insemination (IUI) — better known as the turkey baster method.
Four egg retrievals, where doctors remove eggs, fertilize them in a lab and hope they become embryos. Two for me, two for Carly.
Five embryo transfers, where you spend ten minutes in a procedure room and then try to wait two weeks without losing your mind to see if you get that second blue line.
Seven IUIs
Two failed transfers
Three miscarriages.
Zero children.
Somewhere in there we spent more than $12,000 on donor sperm alone, traveled to Tijuana for more affordable treatment, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border chasing the same dream, and eventually returned to Denver for another chance.
The financial side of infertility is almost as exhausting as the emotional side.
To afford more treatment, I took a second job at Lowe’s loading toilets into people’s cars so I could get better insurance coverage. My wife and I both needed another egg retrieval, and that extra job ended up covering $60,000 worth of fertility care.
I often wonder what people picture when they think about infertility. They probably imagine doctors’ appointments and injections. They probably don’t picture border crossings, second jobs, political conversations with anesthesiologists or writing personal checks to strangers before surgery.
But that’s the thing about this journey.
It becomes your normal.
Fertility is living in perpetual uncertainty. It asks for patience exactly when you’ve run out of it. Every blood draw, shot, procedure and heartbreak feels like progress and nowhere at all.
I don’t have a happy ending to this story.
Yet.
One day we’ll tell our children about the anesthesiologist who debated politics before putting me under, the borders we crossed, the jobs we worked and everything we did to bring them into this world.
Because every single step has always been for one reason.
Them.
Until then, we wait.
Patiently.
With hope, hard work, and more love than we know what to do with.
We’re saving all of it for you, earthside.
Molly DeMarr is a Carbondale local who performed in the 2024 Queer Voices show. She and her wife moved here in March of 2020 and share life with two big goofy dogs. She’s worked and volunteered for local nonprofits and has found joy in the small-town life. She’s enjoyed coaching soccer throughout the Valley, specifically the Basalt Girls Soccer team the past five years and now taking on the role as executive director of Roaring Fork United. Originally from Michigan, she does her best to bring that Midwest steadiness and warmth to everything she does.