The Daily O’Collegian

Gentry Smiling has a hard time putting her younger sister into words.

Maybe it’s because her sibling Tiffany Smiling, a hotel and restaurant administration freshman, has gone through more at 19 than most will go through in their entire lives.

Throughout the past eight years, Tiffany Smiling has relearned to walk and undergone four brain surgeries while keeping a positive attitude when the odds weren’t always in her favor.

Hence the reason why Gentry Smiling refers to her sister as a “little warrior.”

“No matter what she was going through, no matter what she was facing, she told us not to worry,” Gentry Smiling said. “She told us, ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to be fine. It’s just a surgery. Just have a couple of movies rented for me so when I recover, we’ll watch them.’”

When Tiffany Smiling was 12, she was diagnosed with astrocytoma, a rare brain tumor.

The diagnosis came after about two years of testing and doctor visits.

Tiffany Smiling and her family suspected something was wrong with her during a family vacation to Colorado in June 1998.

She told her family that her left arm felt “tingly,” said Brenda Smiling, Tiffany and Gentry’s mother.

When Brenda Smiling looked at her daughter, she noticed Tiffany’s left eye was twitching and her face was slightly drooping.

When they returned home, Brenda Smiling took Tiffany to the pediatrician who suggested that she see a neurologist to receive an MRI, a noninvasive diagnostic procedure that obtains detailed sectional images of the internal structure of the body.

The MRI showed that something was definitely on Tiffany Smiling’s brain, and doctors initially believed the object was a blood vessel tangled in a knot, Brenda Smiling said.

The two years spent questioning and testing what was wrong with Tiffany was “beyond stressful,” Brenda Smiling said.

“I knew as a mom, there was something there,” she said. “She didn’t really know. She was just having tests done. You’re wondering ‘does she have an aneurism?’ It was highly stressful. It’s like ‘just wait and see.’”

After the results from the MRI, the family was then sent to Arizona to a blood vessel specialist who would perform Tiffany Smiling’s first brain surgery. When he operated, the specialist knew what he had found was not a blood vessel. He then performed a biopsy, the removal for diagnostic study of a piece of tissue, to determine what the object was.

The biopsy’s results showed that Tiffany Smiling had a brain tumor.

Brenda Smiling said she remembers the way she felt when she heard the news.

“At first, they handed me a book about childhood cancer and I thought, ‘Tiffany doesn’t have childhood cancer,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I don’t believe this.’ They told me the bad word is ‘malignant.’ Her’s was not considered malignant. Anything foreign in your brain is considered cancer, but her’s was a low-grade tumor that just wanted to grow, which would be very destructive.”

There aren’t any pediatric neurosurgeons in Oklahoma, so the family continued their continuous journey to Houston.

The neurosurgeon there refused to operate on Tiffany Smiling, saying the operation was too risky because the tumor was deep and near her motor skills, the part of the brain that controls movement.

It seemed the family couldn’t catch a break — until Dr. Diane Heaton, a radiation oncologist in Tulsa, suggested the Smilings contact St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

St. Jude is one of the world’s premier centers for research and treatment of catastrophic diseases in children, primarily pediatric cancers, according to its Web site.

The surgeon at St. Jude said he would operate on Tiffany who has in seventh grade at the time.

Tiffany Smiling said because the tumor was wrapped around the right side of her left motor strip, the surgeons took as much as they could.

They couldn’t remove the entire mass because in doing so, they could cause brain damage, she said.

To make matters worse, the tumor was the same color as Tiffany’s brain, she said.

“So they were having to go by touch,” she said.

Brenda Smiling said although there were no problems after the second surgery, with the third surgery came a devastating discovery.

The surgeon had accidentally either clipped or bruised a blood vessel, Brenda Smiling said.

“When she woke up, she was crying,” she said. “She tried to talk, and she couldn’t, and she tried to lift her left hand and it fell back down. She looked like she had had a stroke.”

The next day when Tiffany tried to get up, she had trouble moving her left leg.

“Her right leg would take a step, and her left leg would want to collapse,” Brenda Smiling said. “By the time we left the hospital, they were having her walk around the floor, trying to motivate it to start walking.”

Tiffany Smiling said she began rehabilitation in Tulsa immediately after her surgery and continued until she went back to St. Jude in March where she continued rehab.

“It was really difficult,” she said. “I still have trouble with it today. It’s weak, but it’s a lot stronger than it was. I couldn’t move it at all.”

Tiffany’s final surgery was in December 2004 when was a sophomore in high school.

Brenda Smiling said this time, the family decided it was time to ask God for a miracle.

They called family members in North Carolina and also in Oklahoma and asked everyone to begin praying for Tiffany at 7 p.m.

“At 7 o’clock, my husband and I, we laid hands on Tiffany,” she said. “We prayed over her, knowing that people in North Carolina and Oklahoma were all in agreement with us at the same time. Talk about feeling the Lord’s presence in that room. It was amazing. That was where I felt like we just need to get ahold of God, desperately need to get ahold of God, because she needs a miracle.”

After her fourth surgery, doctors said Tiffany Smiling could go through radiation treatment to get rid of the rest of the tumor.

She started radiation in March 2005 with the treatment lasting six weeks.

Since April 2005, Tiffany Smiling has been in remission.

Even though a mass still exists on Tiffany’s brain, it is dormant after the radiation killed its cells.

Brenda Smiling said she is thankful for the treatment Tiffany was able to receive at St. Jude.

The hospital’s daily operating costs are about $1.3 million, which are primarily covered by public contributions, according to the St. Jude Web site.

Tiffany and Gentry Smiling recently were part of a team of students who helped raise money for St. Jude through a program called Up ‘til Dawn.

Up ‘til Dawn is a collegiate fundraiser that helps raise money for the hospital through students who participate in a letter-writing campaign.

The OSU group held its finale event Friday at 8 p.m. where executive directors announced that this year, Up ‘til Dawn volunteers raised $54,949 through their letter writing campaign, said Megan Porter, Up ‘til Dawn’s executive director.

With the program, each participant sends out 50 letters, asking for donations for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

In the eight years that OSU’s students have helped, the total amount raised has continued to rise, Porter said.

For example, last year, students raised about $35,000.

“I always hoped that we could get to the spot that we are now, getting up there and competing with the best schools in the nation for how much money we raised,” she said.

About 400 students participated at Up ‘til Dawn this year, up from 300 last year.

“I love telling people all you have to do is come do letter writing for a few hours with your friends, hang out, eat free food and listen to awesome music, and that’s all you have to do,” she said.

Porter said being a volunteer for Up ‘til Dawn is not a large time commitment and the few hours the students help make a huge difference in the lives of the patients.

“These kids don’t ever have to pay for their treatment, and their families don’t ever have to worry about that, because students like us have raised money,” Porter said.

Brenda Smiling said it’s programs like Up ‘til Dawn that keep St. Jude running, which in turn helps save the lives of children like her daughter Tiffany.

Tiffany still goes to St. Jude every six months and beginning next year will hopefully have to go only once a year.

She said she plans to continue raising awareness about cancer and helping St. Jude even after she stops going to the hospital.

The past eight years haven’t been easy for the Smiling family but they all agreed it has brought them closer to each other and God.

The experience has made Tiffany Smiling a lot stronger of a person too, she said.

“If I looked back, I wouldn’t change anything that has happened,” she said. “It just makes me who I am. God has blessed me so much, and I thank Him every day for that.”