In Memory of an Angel, Miranda Zeigler

Miranda celebrates on New Year's Eve, 2007.

Miranda Kaye Zeigler had aspirations.

Maybe she would be a teacher, because loved helping kids. Or maybe she would be a veterinarian, because she wanted to help animals. But when Miranda was diagnosed with cancer she talked about doing something else.

“Miranda used to say, ‘when I’m a cancer survivor I’m going to go do this and I’m going to go do that for teenagers with cancer,” said Tammi Zeigler, Miranda’s mom.

“She was a helper,” said Jeff Zeigler, Miranda’s dad.

If there was a way to help someone, Miranda was there to assist them. Every new kid’s first friend at school was Miranda. That’s why her high school started a club, Miranda’s Club, in her memory. The club’s members act as ambassadors to incoming freshmen and new students throughout each school year.

“We didn’t have anything to do with that,” Tammi says. “That’s just who she was, always happy to help others with a smile.”

That’s what everyone who knew Miranda talks about – her smile.

“I can see her smiling right now,” says Katie Mikos, Miranda’s friend. “God shined light through her.”

Miranda, 14 years old when she was diagnosed with cancer, was making plans with Mikos and other friends in the summer of 2008. She played softball and field hockey and decided to try tennis in high school. She talked to friends about picking out her first homecoming dress and the boys she liked, but never had a boyfriend. She also thought about spending time with her brother Scott, who was going to be a senior.

“I’ve thought about how she was never able to drive,” says Stacie Roller, another one of Miranda’s friends. 

“She never went to high school either. We were supposed to have classes together. She never got to experience any of that with us.”

But the summer that she got cancer was a particularly exciting one. Miranda had her birthday party to start the summer. Katie still remembers the red shirt, a black and white skirt and the long black leggings that Miranda wore that day. It would the last time Katie would see Miranda.

“I never thought when I said good-bye that it really meant bye,” Katie says.

Miranda also got her first job that summer at King’s Kid’s Camp, a church camp only a half-mile away from her house. She cooked breakfast and lunch for kids, a job that Scott had before her. She’d work in the morning and afternoon, come home and run on the treadmill. Sometimes when she came home Scott would take her to Sheetz for an Icee.

“Miranda really looked up to Scott,” Jeff said. “They weren’t like most brothers and sisters. They got along really well.”

The last thing Miranda got do before she became ill – before a long and agonizing battle against cancer – was attending a Jonas Brothers concert with her friend Gabrielle.

“She was a huge Jonas Brothers fan,” Tammi said. “That was like the pinnacle of her life.”

Miranda, standing 4th from the right, attends her first Jonas Brothers concert.

In Memory of an Angel, Part 2

Miranda woke up the morning after the Jonas Brothers concert ready to go on a week-long road trip with her family, but she had a small, annoying cough.

“We just kind of wrote it off, because she screamed so much at the concert,” Jeff said.

But Miranda grew weaker.

First, they took her to an emergency room in Illinois on the second day of their trip. Doctors said she had something viral – maybe strep throat or mononucleosis. She was given antibiotics and an inhaler.

Still, Miranda grew weaker.

The swelling around her neck spread to her chest over the next four days in Missouri and Oklahoma, so they took her to another emergency room where blood tests didn’t provide any significant results. Tammi wasn’t satisfied.

“I was starting to get irritated and threw a little bit of a fit,” Tammi said.

The doctor offered to do a chest x-ray, one that revealed a mass in Miranda’s chest.

“The doctor said it looked like lymphoma,” Jeff said. “We had trouble wrapping our heads around that, but even then I wanted to get back to our doctors to find out what was going on.”

Three days later, on Aug. 7, 2008, Miranda was diagnosed with High Risk T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

“We talked about what would happen and how we were going to go about the next couple of years until we got through it,” Jeff said.

But Miranda seemed unafraid as the doctor explained to her what she had. She aimlessly rolled around in the doctor’s wheel chair and listened.

“The oncologist asked if she understood,” Tammi said. “Miranda said she did and then asked why she should worry.”

That’s how Miranda handled most things. She was always positive, always stronger for others around her. 

She didn’t care that her face and body would get puffy. She didn’t care that she would lose her hair. She just wanted to start chemotherapy right away.

“The only thing that worried her was her hair growing back curly, because she used to spend 40 minutes straightening it,” Tammi said.

Miranda had a bone marrow procedure and chemotherapy on the same day she was diagnosed. She went 

home a week later, but began to battle infections. Her hair fell out exactly two weeks after her first chemotherapy. As a nurse shaved the last bit of hair she had left, Miranda and Tammi cried together.

“I think it was more traumatic and upsetting than she thought it would be,” Tammi said.

On top of battling cancer and several infections, Miranda also quickly developed steroid induced diabetes and several bouts of pneumonia.

29 days after her diagnosis she was abruptly taken off of prednisone, which caused a tiny bleed on her brain that caused a stroke. She would never walk unassisted again.

“That’s when she lost a little bit of her strong spirit,” Jeff said.

But Miranda kept fighting. By this time her parents had gotten her a laptop to keep up with schoolwork. School had always been important to Miranda even though she was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2^nd grade. Wherever Miranda was a notebook and pencil could be found nearby.

“She was very creative, so overcoming dyslexia was huge for her,” Tammi said.

Still, Miranda became weaker, and doctors couldn’t explain what was happening anymore. Her lungs filled with pneumonia, making it difficult to breathe. She was put in a wheelchair and on a feeding tube by late October for the rest of her life.

“She lost all control of her body,” Jeff said. “She wouldn’t show it in front of nurses or doctors, but she was frustrated. She showed how scared she was with us.”

Miranda became dependent for almost everything in early November. Her hands became so puffy that she couldn’t navigate her phone, so her parents texted her friends for her. Her arms and legs became so weak that she couldn’t get into her wheelchair on her own. One night while Miranda sat on a shower chair and Tammi bathed her, Miranda cried the entire time.

“She had meltdowns when she had to, and I would breakdown with her,” Tammi said. “You have to realize she had just started to become a young woman, and everything that came with it was suddenly taken away from her.”

Miranda, despite battling numerous illnesses, was sent home for nine days before Christmas. Sporting what looked like a buzz cut, Miranda beamed in pictures with her family in the days leading up to Christmas 2008. But her natural buzz cut hair length was a bad sign for cancer patients. She would have been completely bald if her body was strong enough to handle the chemotherapy needed to battle her cancer.

“I look at those pictures now and think of how much work and pain that it took for her to be home,” Tammie said. “She was so happy to be home, but she was in so much pain.”

Miranda became violently ill the next day and gained 40 pounds of fluid. The doctors were still baffled by Miranda’s numerous, converging illnesses. Her kidneys began failing and pneumonia consumed her lungs so much that doctors and nurses often swarmed her hospital room at night to help her breath.

“They called us to the quiet room on Jan. 2,” Tammi said. “That’s never a good thing.”

Doctors finally found an answer for Miranda’s months of unsolved illnesses. She developed sHLH – secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis – a rare bone marrow disease that occurs in one of every 1.2 million pediatric cancer patients. Her likelihood of survival dropped to less than 2 percent.

“We felt it was a rough patch we had to get through,” Jeff said. “That’s how we talked to Miranda about it, too. We talked like we normally would have and stayed positive.”

The doctors put two options on the table for Miranda. She could either go home for hospice or attempt two long-shot chemotherapies to try to get her to go into remission. Remission was the only way she could get a bone marrow transplant for the bone marrow disease.

It was her only shot at survival.

“Four days after the first chemotherapy was done we knew it didn’t work,” Tammi said. “You feel like you know it’s going to work, and then it doesn’t. That was bad.”

The second chemotherapy caused worse results than the first one. Miranda suffered neurological damage, began having trouble understanding what was happening around her and lost some of her vision. She also developed VRE - vancomycin-resistant enterococcus – a bacteria that made her pneumonia completely resistant to antibiotics. The bacteria caused her to go into heart, lung and kidney failure.

“I don’t think we ever thought we’d get to that point,” Jeff said. “It was awful.”

Miranda was to be taken to PICU – the pediatric intensive care unit. She had trouble comprehending what was happening in the days leading up to her transfer from her hospital room, but something changed on the morning she was taken to PICU. She returned to her normal self, if only for a few hours.

Nurses had her ready to be taken to be PICU in the early morning, but they were two hours late in transferring her. Miranda grew irritated and asked what was taking so long. She had grown up in a military family and took on her dad’s personality. While goofy and loving, they were also prompt and stubborn.

“She was irritated, but also funny and sarcastic about it,” Tammi said. “Those little moments of Miranda being herself meant a lot.”

The doctors wanted to take Miranda to PICU to strengthen her lungs, because she was no longer holding in oxygen. She was supposed to return to her hospital room after a few days, but her breathing gradually worsened.

“We weren’t scared and Miranda wasn’t scared,” Tammi said. “We all thought it was another hump we had to get through for a few days.”

Tammi and Jeff communicated with Miranda for the last time as they wheeled her to PICU.

“I think the last thing we said was, ‘we’ll see you in a little bit,’” Jeff said. “We thought we’d see her, again.”

Miranda passed away a few days later on Jan. 30, 2009.

“Miranda was ventilated those last few days, so she was asleep,” Tammi said. “She didn’t feel any pain.”

Miranda, exhausted, poses with Christmas presents from her brother, Scott. 

In Memory of an Angel, Part 3

Miranda’s THON organizations - Omega Phi Alpha and Pi Lambda Phi  – had been trying to visit her for months, and the Zeiglers agreed to a hospital room barbeque on Jan. 31, 2009. They’d sent Miranda gifts and cards for months, but they were finally going to get to see her.

“That was the day after Miranda passed away, so we didn’t get to do that with them,” Tammi said.

While the Zeiglers don’t remember much about Miranda’s memorial service two days later, they remembered seeing a large group of young people that they didn’t recognize. It was Miranda’s THON organizations.

“There was a huge snow storm that day and night,” Tammi said. “I was blown away that they drove all the way from State College.”

That showing of support prompted Tammi and Jeff to go to THON just three weeks after Miranda’s passing, but some people questioned how they could go to THON so soon after they lost their daughter.

“You don’t understand until you’ve lost a child in this situation,” Tammi said. “Then you go to THON and feel like 15,000 people are hugging you all at once.”

She says the Zeigler’s haven’t gone a day without THON in their lives. They host Miranda's THON organizations - now Omega Phi Alpha and Alpha Gamma Rho - for canning trips each year and visit them for barbecues at University Park. 

It’s a bond held together by a tragedy.

“They dance in memory of Miranda and so that someday no other parent has to be telling this story of losing their child to cancer,” Tammi said.

Following Miranda’s passing her hometown, friends and family got more involved in THON than they ever had been.

Stacie joined the Northern High School’s mini-THON in her freshman year and eventually became the school’s THON chair in her senior year. She also donated 15 inches of her to cancer patients, fitting because 15 was Miranda’s softball number. The tattoo she had inked on her foot is a daily reminder of her Miranda.

“It’s still devastating to me,” Stacie said. “She was always such a happy person.”

Katie has helped with fundraisers for the foundation Tammi and Jeff started in her hometown for the last four years, too. She keeps pictures of Miranda in her dorm room, so she sees Miranda’s smile every day.

“Miranda’s smile was absolutely contagious,” Katie said. “I get to see it every time I’m in my room.”

Tammi and Jeff listened to Miranda talk about helping other teenagers with cancer so much that they decided to do her work for her. Just a few months after she passed away they started The Miranda K. Zeigler Memorial Foundation – better known as Miranda’s Smile – to assist teenagers with cancer.

“It’s part to honor Miranda and part to help other kids, because we know what they’re going through,” Jeff said. “If for a moment in time we can give them a little joy, then that’s what we’re doing.”

The foundation offers gifts, like laptops and iPhones, to teenagers battling cancer. The foundation goes as far to purchase basic necessities for teenagers’ families, too. That could mean anything from buying groceries to helping to pay utility bills.

“Miranda had all of these ideas for things that could be done for teenagers,” Tammi said. “She would say it’s different for a 5-year old than a 15-year old fighting cancer. What they go through is different, what they know is different and what they need is different.”

The gifts given to teenagers from Miranda’s Smile are appropriately named, too.

“We call them smiles,” Jeff said.

Miranda poses with her mom, (Tammi), brother, (Scott), and dad, (Jeff), five days before she is diagnosed with High Risk T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. She survived cancer for 176 days.
All photos courtesy Zeigler family.