When Ashton Miller was still alive, battling cancer while going to UNC, she didn’t have a support group.
But the organization founded in her memory, Ashton’s Angels, will begin providing support for young adults with cancer after it is approved as an official student group, which organizers expect to happen in the next few weeks.
Miller died two months before her graduation date in the spring of 2010 after enduring embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare form of childhood cancer, for three years.
“When you’re in college and you have cancer, there aren’t a lot of people you can talk to about it. It’s not something you can talk to your friends about,” Judy Miller, Ashton Miller’s mom, said.
Judy Miller said there are support groups for children and older adults, but being a cancer patient in college is particularly difficult because a student is no longer a child but not yet considered an adult. She added that her daughter’s room at N.C. Children’s Hospital was decorated with Disney characters, indicating that the hospital is geared toward much younger patients.
“There are Carolina students who have cancer and are getting treatment and fly under the radar,” said sophomore Elizabeth Grady, president of Ashton’s Angels at UNC. “They can be underloading classes, and people don’t even know that. We want them to feel like a part of the Carolina community.”
Grady said programs like the Make-A-Wish Foundation and other groups provide services for children, and many support groups exist for adults, but college students don’t fit into either age group.
“We want to help college students from ages 18 to 23 because there really isn’t funding for this age group,” said Annie Scheffer, UNC vice president of Ashton’s Angels and a member of Ashton Miller’s sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha.
A group including Ashton Miller’s parents, friends and a favorite teacher first started the organization at Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, which Ashton Miller attended.
