Campaign Story

Hello all, and thank you for taking a look at our story. We are Kaleb & Amy Toda, I’m a police officer & professional jouster, & he’s in construction & my head squire. Our road to growing a family has been almost 2 years so far. I (blessedly) have grown children of my own. Kaleb has never experienced being a father, and had decided he wanted this with me. We knew it would be extremely difficult for many reasons, being as I have damaged fallopian tubes and was 45 as well. After all the doctor visits, tests and trials, we went to IVF as our first hopeful option. We did our homework & learned that neither of our insurances were going to help with anything, not even medications. The most cost efficient programs we could find were all out of state, so we bit the bullet & began digging into our savings to travel between Oklahoma & Colorado. More tests, invasive & painful of course, countless injections later we had 5 fertilized embryos, only 3 of which had shown promising numbers. We made the 10+ hour drive again for our 1st transfer. Weeks more of medications, diet changes, prayers and bloodwork ended in a heartbreaking phone call to tell us it had failed. Again we made the drives, and again we had failures. We were told after the last FET loss that our best option would be to find a donor & use donor eggs, or embryo adoption. This package meant another $13,000, not including medications, Doctor visits, lab work, and travel. We went immediately to work on looking at possible matches and have been on waiting lists for those. Unfortunately, most of the donors are through the New York location, and NOT in Colorado.  After following the donor lists for months, we saw 3 promising match possibilities come open, and reached out to the donor team immediately.  2 of these got snatched up before we got our names on the lists, but we made it on the 3rd and began the match process.  Happy news came that we were matched, we paid our deposit and began to wait again.  Finally the word came that out donor would be doing her retrieval in Syracuse within the next month.  While this was exciting news, it also meant time crunch and money juggling again as we had to get Kaleb’s sperm to  New York asap for fertilization.  After checking on our options/costs, we learned it was actually cheaper to fly there and deliver fresh in person that to pay cryo & shipping fees for the sample alone.  Fast planning and another credit card charge and we were on our way to Syracuse.   We bought the package of 6 donor eggs, and 5 made it to blast.  Fats forward to today, January 1st, and we are packing our suitcase to travel to Colorado for another transfer.  I’m turning 48 this year, but we are hopeful and will do whatever needs to be done to make our miracle baby happen. In the mean time, Kaleb gets plenty of practice with our beautiful Goddaughter that we are helping to raise, who by the way, was also the blessing of years of infertility treatments. Thank you again, from the bottom of our hearts, for taking the time to read & consider helping us in this journey. He’s going to be a wonderful dad, & I’ll be honored to make that happen.