1 of 2
2 of 2
On a clear November night in 2009, Keleigh Milliorn and her sister Kristan Corrington “Kacie” Ahmann took a break from cooking a Thanksgiving feast and went out on the back porch.
There, the two hugged, cried and tried to make sense of everything.
It had been a rough few years. Kacie spent the past six years fighting chronic myeloid leukemia. It was a tough battle as she experienced some of the worst chemotherapy side effects her oncologist had ever seen. She jokingly dubbed herself the “worst patient ever,” and Keleigh got her a custom tank top with those exact word bedazzled in Swarovski crystals.
Just as Kacie experienced major lows, there was a hopeful high. She was enrolled in a trial for a new drug that was developed through a grant from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Her side effects, though still challenging, were manageable, and she went into remission.
But in 2009, doctors discovered a mutation in her leukemia and an abnormality in her marrow. She was left with one option: a stem cell transplant. Given the horrible side effects Kacie had already experienced, she and Keleigh both viewed the transplant with misgiving.
“We honestly felt like it was a death sentence,” Keleigh says.
All of that led up to the emotional conversation on Keleigh’s back porch in Southlake.
"One of the things I said to her was ‘Promise me that you won't die. And I promise you that if it gets too bad, I'll tell you it's ok to go,’” Keleigh recalls. “We promised that and then the next day we put on our big girl panties and decided to go about getting her well.”
The Battle
After a hard night of crying and coming to terms with Kacie’s diagnosis, the whole family went on a trip to South Padre. It was cold, but they were together, and that’s all that mattered. Later, they threw her a shower, where all of her friends gathered and gave her things to make her hospital stay more cheerful.
On February 2, 2010, Kacie entered the hospital. She loved bright colors and sparkles, so the room was adorned accordingly.
“Her room was completely decorated,” Keleigh laughs. “Nurses would walk in and be like 'Wow!'”
That is only a small glimpse into the light they tried to bring into Kacie’s hospital stay. Keleigh and other family members were constantly coming up with ways to entertain and radiate positivity.
From blowing up latex gloves and batting them around like balloons, to everyone wearing surgical masks in solidarity, Kacie’s crew kept things as light-hearted as possible. Then the day arrived when she was matched with a non-familial marrow donor and soon it would be time for her transplant.
“It was an amazing day,” Keleigh recalls. “I'm looking at a bag of stem cells and I'm realizing that I'm looking at my sister's life in this bag. We prayed over it and we prayed for the donor and then they hooked it up to her.”
The next day, Kacie had a cough. Test results showed that it was from a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). For most healthy individuals, this would act as a common cold. But for Kacie, whose immune system had been brought down for the transplant, RSV was life-threatening.
She was rushed to the ICU and put in a pressure negative room, which allowed air to flow into the room but not escape from the room, preventing other patients from also contracting RSV.
“One of the nurses told me it had an 85 percent chance of killing her,” Keleigh says. “I couldn't fathom that.”
Even in the ICU waiting room, Keleigh and her family made an effort to comfort others. Even when Kacie slipped into a coma for two months.
“There's a hierarchy in the ICU waiting room. Whoever has been there the longest gets the best seats,” she jokes. “Eventually we were the people who had been there the longest. We'd give food to people and encourage them. We were kind of like the candy stripers of the ICU. We hung up pictures of her so that people would know what she looked like before.”
Ultimately, Kacie beat RSV. Sadly, her immune system was so weak and her body was so tired from fighting, that it became a fight to survive. She was suffering from hallucinations and eventually developed Graft vs. Host Disease, a condition that occurs when donor bone marrow attacks the recipient. To treat this, her doctor had to suppress her immune system. Not long after, she came down with pneumonia.
“She was talking to us at 1 p.m. and was gone by 3 p.m.,” Keleigh says. “I held her and I whispered into her ear, ‘You worked hard, it's okay. You kept your promise, and now I'm keeping mine. It's OK for you to go.’”
Kacie passed away that day, April 12, 2010, at 44 years of age. In respect of her wishes, everyone wore bright colors to her remembrance service.
“She wanted everyone to wear orange to her funeral because she said you should get a new outfit out of the deal,” Keleigh laughs.
While Keleigh remembers the hard battle and uses that to help others, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you ask her about Kacie.
“She was outgoing and funny and beautiful,” Keleigh says with a smile. “Everyone loved her. She had people who would have laid down their lives for her because she was that good of a friend.”
The Nomination
Around the same time in the same city, a little girl named Chloe Brown fought off leukemia twice before turning five years old. During her journey to recovery, she became obsessed with the Dallas Stars hockey team. At the time, one of the players, Vernon "Vern" Fiddler, had a suite and would invite children cancer patients to watch the games from there.
Now a healthy, spunky 12-year-old, Chloe is still an avid fan of the Stars. In fact, she was at a game when she met Keleigh.
In the American Airlines Center where the Stars play, Keleigh is known as the “sign lady.” For each home game, she handmakes creative, themed signs to root on her team. She estimates that she has made hundreds of signs.
Initially brought together by their mutual love of the Stars, Keleigh and Chloe bonded over a shared experience of being impacted by leukemia.
"Both are Dallas Stars diehards,” laughs Rhonda Brown, Chloe’s mom. “Chloe has kind of a ritual. She wants to arrive when the doors open and she goes down and waits for the warm up to start, which is about an hour after the doors open. Keleigh also sits down there, and they began talking while they waited. They became friends and we absolutely love her and her husband."
In honor of her journey through leukemia, Chloe was named Girl of the Year by the North Texas chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She now sits on the board and recently nominated Keleigh to campaign for LLS Woman of the Year.
"Chloe knew that Keleigh could do a good job because she understood what her sister had gone through and what she had gone through,” Rhonda says.
Late last month, Keleigh’s campaign began, and it will run until June 8. If – or as Keleigh says, “when” – she raises $50,000, a national research grant will be named after her sister.
“I'm the first person to run from this area,” Keliegh says. “I want to show them what Southlake and Grapevine can do. We have an amazing community and I went to spotlight that.”
The Campaign
When asked what she thinks Kacie would say about her run for LLS Woman of the Year, Keleigh laughs.
"She'd say, '$50,000 is bull...,” she said. “She'd tell me I could do more.”
And in many ways, Keleigh already has done more. Prior to her campaign to raise at least $50,000, Keleigh has used her journey to help comfort others going through similar struggles.
“I tried to use what I learned through the whole process to help other people,” she says. “I've walked that road, and it sucks, but I've walked it and it's better if you're not walking alone.”
Keleigh is now well on her way to raising money to fight the disease that took her sister. Even the Dallas Stars have sent her a signed jersey that she will use as an auction item. Whether she earns the title or not, she will be contributing to the $220 million that man and woman of the year candidates have raised since 1990.
For Keleigh, to have a grant named after Kacie would mean things coming full circle. The drug that helped Kacie the most during her battle was funded by an LLS grant. Now, it’s Keleigh’s chance to give back. If anyone can do it, it’s this unbreakable woman.
“God taught me a long time ago that I was stronger than I knew,” she says. “I always thought that I was strong but having been through all of this I realized that although I'm weak in a lot of ways. You can't break me.”
To donate and find more information on Keleigh's cause, click here.