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During her cancer treatment, Brooklynn Miller sits with a gift bag before giving it to a nurse at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin.
Williamson County resident Erika Spies founded The Brooklynn Miller Foundation to honor her daughter, Brooklynn, who passed away last October after battling osteosarcoma, an aggressive type of bone cancer.
The Brooklynn Miller Foundation supports children fighting cancer and their families by providing thoughtful gift bags that include things like toys, games, crafts and stuffed animals. Currently, they work with Dell Children’s hospital and Dell Children’s Home hospice team.
They also provide couples care kits to offer comfort to parents as they help their child fight cancer, and memorial gifts to those who have lost a child to cancer. “
[Brooklynn] always loved to give gifts,” Ms. Spies said. “She loved to give them more than she liked to get them, and she liked to get them a whole lot.”
The organization accepts monetary donations, as well as donated gifts and handcrafted items like knitted, crocheted, or sewn goods that could be given to a patient. Volunteer opportunities are also available. The foundation helps keep Brooklynn’s memory alive.
“[Brooklynn] told me that I had to start a foundation in her name that gives [gifts] to other kids that have cancer,” Ms. Spies said. “She told me that I have to fight to raise awareness for childhood cancer.”
A tragic diagnosis
Twelve-year-old Brooklynn was on summer break, awaiting the start of seventh grade at Jarrell Middle School, when she started to complain of knee pain.
“I figured it was growing pains,” Ms. Spies said. “I took her to her doctor and they said it was growing pains. Then one day, Brooklynn woke up and she had fingerprint bruises all over her left arm. It looked like someone had just poked her repeatedly.”
Doctors ordered a blood panel. Other than her blood platelet count being low, all the tests came back normal. But Ms. Spies had a feeling that something else must be wrong and insisted that they do an x-ray.
Doctors said they didn’t expect to find anything, but after Ms. Spies and Brooklynn had left the office, doctors called and said they had to come back.
“We stopped at Chick-fil-a and had almost gotten to the Walburg exit, then the doctor called and said, ‘Nevermind. I need you to come back—it is cancer,’ ” Ms. Spies remembered. “We went [to the hospital] on a Friday. That Monday they did the first biopsy and after that she never walked on her own again.”
A full-body MRI showed that cancer was in every bone in her body, “head to toe,” Ms. Spies said. Doctors said surgery wasn’t an option because she had too many tumors.
She said they set a goal to have people from every state pray for Brooklynn, and they ended up with support from people from each state, as well as 109 different countries and all seven continents.
“We have pictures of someone in Antarctica with a sign saying they were praying, pictures of military members in undisclosed locations praying for her,” Ms. Spies said.
Brooklynn went through two rounds of chemo, her mom said. She loved to parade around the hospital in her wheelchair with a bowl of snacks— offering candy to people passing by. To distract herself from discomfort during procedures, she made art for the nurses and doctors.
They had hoped that the treatments would slow the growth of the tumors. However, scans showed that the chemo hadn’t helped and that the tumors had grown larger.
Her family went on a Make-a-Wish Foundation trip to Disneyland, in which she visited her favorite characters from the movie Lilo & Stitch and gave gifts to the volunteers who worked at Make-a-Wish’s Give Kids The World Village.
“Even more than going to the parks and doing all the fun stuff, she wanted to give to the volunteers,” Ms. Spies said sincerely. “She made art pieces and wrote cards. I think we did 40 or 50 bags for the volunteers.”
However, Brooklynn’s health worsened by the end of the trip, which had to be cut short.
“That was about the time she started asking me if she was going to die,” Ms. Spies recalled. “She looked at me and said, ‘I know I’m gonna die.’ ”
She said Brooklynn cried, but came to grips with not being able to live out her dream. She asked for her art supplies, requested her mom play the song “Dancing in the Sky,” and sang along.
“I sat there and bawled like a baby while she sang every word without a tear,” Ms. Spies said. “She kept asking if I was going to be ok. I told her yes, I’m going to miss you, but I will be ok. Biggest lie I ever told in my life.”
Brooklynn gave her mother a list of things to do — including requests for a funeral and goals for a foundation to help others.
Keeping her memory alive
Through the foundation, Ms. Spies has met and served other families who went through a similar experience.
“The biggest thing I tell parents is to listen to their kids,” Ms. Spies said. “If they say something is wrong, take them to the doctor. You know your kid’s body a lot better than they do.”
Along with the foundation, Brooklynn made her mom promise that she would do her best to get funding for cancer research increased.
“Brooklynn said, ‘No kid should have to go through this. I’m glad I’m doing it so it doesn’t have to be anybody else. You’ve got to make sure that you try to stop other people from getting it too,’ ” her mom retold. “I said OK.”
Ms. Spies said that only four percent of the government funding for cancer research goes toward researching childhood cancer.
Putting together gift bags for children and parents with cancer has helped Ms. Spies cope with her grief. She is currently accepting handmade crafts and monetary donations for her gift giving efforts. The Brooklynn Miller Foundation will host a barbecue cook-off fundraiser in June and in November. They are also planning a clay shoot fundraiser.
More information can be found online at https://bmillerfoundation.org.