Several weeks ago, Ryann O’Toole woke up at 3:45 a.m. to the sound of her dog Louie throwing up. Worried, she decided to take him in see the emergency vet. As she was getting ready O’Toole, pregnant with her first child, started to experience stomach cramps.
The cramps came in waves and left her doubled over in pain. At the vet’s office, she called her wife, who was in Germany for work, and asked her to phone a friend to come take over at the vet’s office. Meanwhile, another friend met O’Toole at the emergency room as she checked in with early contractions.
O’Toole, 39, was six months pregnant at the time.
“The doctor shut me down,” she said.
No golf, no workouts.
She was released after 36 hours and flew to Hawaii the next week to enjoy a vacation at the condo she’d already booked and paid for during the LPGA's Lotte Championship.
Mercifully, O’Toole hasn’t had any contractions since that scare and has been cleared for light activity.
The past week, her main job was checking her phone every so often to see how Jeeno Thitikul was faring in China.
O’Toole has been on a $1 million watch since she began maternity leave following the FM Championship in late August. As the leader of the Aon Risk Reward Challenge, it made more sense to sit on her lead as golf got tougher further along in her pregnancy.
While O’Toole hasn’t technically clinched the race, Jeeno Thitikul needs two double eagles in her next event, the Toto Japan Classic, to win it for a second time. (At this point, Thitikul hasn’t signed up for The Annika driven by Gainbridge at Pelican, the final event before the cutoff.)
It's safe for O’Toole to start thinking about how she might invest the biggest check of her career.
“It’s like winning three tournaments or a major,” she gushed. “It’s unbelievable.”
At the start of the 2026 season, O’Toole had two main areas of focus: improve her playing status after Q-School and grow the family.
Last January, O’Toole was in Los Angeles for an egg retrieval when she got word that her brother Brennan had been in a horrific accident. She rushed back to Arizona to be by his side.
Ryann O'Toole will play in the penultimate group on Saturday at the LPGA's first major of the year. It's already been a life-changing year for O'Toole, whose younger brother Brennan was involved in a horrific accident on Jan. 16 while driving a side-by-side.
— Beth Ann Nichols (@GolfweekNichols) April 25, 2026
Brennan, 32, was… pic.twitter.com/QUmFza5B8H
In April, she underwent an IVF embryo transfer and while playing the Mizuho Americas Open in May, she took a drugstore pregnancy test in New Jersey that came back positive. The next Monday at 7 a.m., she was outside Labcorp waiting for the doors to open to take a blood test before beginning a 36-hole U.S. Women’s Open qualifier at Essex Country Club. At lunchtime, after the first 18 holes, she checked her email and confirmed the happy news.
“It took the first time, which was great,” said O’Toole. “I feel very lucky.”
For 15 years, O’Toole has been one of the fittest players on tour, and coming into the 2026 season, she pushed herself as hard as ever. At the start of the season, she had picked up 7 to 8 yards with driver and up to 9 yards more with 3-wood. The combination surely helped provide more opportunities for a contest that rewards strategy and risk.
“It’s fun being 39, and I can still move it,” she said, though she wonders what will come back post-pregnancy.
O’Toole started to focus on Aon around the JM Eagle LA Championship, where she played the designated hole in 3 under. The next week at the Chevron Championship, she finished T-7 and collected her biggest paycheck – $213,262 – since winning her first LPGA title five years ago. O’Toole made $225,000 when she won the 2021 Women’s Scottish Open.
While seven-figure checks have become more common in recent years, with six coming at the majors and CME, Aon’s bonus money can still be life-changing for many.
The now retired Julieta Granada became the first woman to claim a $1 million prize. The greenskeeper’s daughter was 20 when she won the 2006 ADT Championship and naively thought she’d be set for life with that kind of money.
“I was young and immature, obviously,” she said many years later. “You think that it’s going to last forever. The reality is if I didn’t win that kind of money, I probably still wouldn’t be playing because it was a huge cushion to have. It is life-changing.”
Carlota Ciganda won the first Aon contest back in 2019 and shed tears during the press conference as she talked about her family. O’Toole will be 33 weeks pregnant at the time of the CME and unable to travel, but there’s no doubt that her smile and her story will cross the miles.
“Going into next year, I don’t know when I’m going to start back up,” said O’Toole. “To have this nest egg when I’ve got a kid coming is huge.”
Beth Ann Nichols is a Golfweek senior writer covering the LPGA and women's golf.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: LPGA player poised to win $1 million Aon bonus while on maternity leave