Meet Tayde

Ever since she was little, Tayde dreamed of being a mother. However, at the age of 7, her life took a drastic turn when she started feeling fatigued and had leg pain and bruises all over her body. Blood tests in Mexico, her home country, revealed that Tayde suffered from acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common type of childhood cancer. Her family was devastated.

Through some friends, the family learned about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They traveled from Mexico to St. Jude, and Tayde underwent two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy. When she was 12 years old, two years after her treatment ended, the cancer returned. Once again, the family returned to St. Jude, and Tayde underwent two-and-a-half more years of chemotherapy, during which she responded well to the treatment and her cancer went into remission.

Even before she could finish treatment the second time, her family received heart-wrenching news: the cancer was already back again. For a third time, Tayde was in the fight for her life, this time undergoing rigorous rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. She finished her treatment in 1995.

In 2011, Tayde married her husband, Scott, and was excited to start building a family of her own. Unfortunately, after several years of trying to get pregnant, including appointments with fertility experts and intrauterine insemination (IUI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF), Tayde could not conceive. “It was very difficult emotionally,” Tayde said. “Over and over I kept finding out that I wasn’t pregnant and it affected me a lot.”

At the beginning of 2016, as unlikely as it seemed, Tayde and Scott discovered that she was pregnant. Their daughter, Tayde Sofia, was born in October that year.

It was an incredible gift. She’s my miracle child.

Tayde talking about her daughter, Tayde Sofia

Tayde returned to work on the Patient Engagement Team in the marketing department at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, after the birth of her second miracle: a son named Jack.