- Dr. Amy Miller, a Lehigh Valley Health Network family medicine specialist, found herself in a role reversal after she was diagnosed in March with acute myeloid leukemia
- It came just weeks before the St. Luke's Half Marathon — a race Miller ran after she started chemotherapy
- She'll bookend her treatment this Sunday by running in the half marathon of the St. Luke's D&L RaceFest
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — As thousands of people run off at the St. Luke’s D&L RaceFest this Sunday, it won’t be easy to spot Amy Miller.
Even in a race day outfit of bright pink and powder blue, she’ll be among the thousands powering through flat terrain and crisp autumn temperatures in a half-marathon that starts in Downtown Bethlehem and ends at Scott Park in Easton.
But if you do happen to catch a glimpse of Miller, what you won’t see is visual evidence of the illness and treatments she endured for the last nine months.
What you will see is an orange ribbon on the back of her shirt, and a date on the front where life forever changed for this Lehigh Valley Health Network doctor, wife and mother of five: March 15, 2023.
“I remember waking up that morning. It was Wednesday that I was directed to go to the ER. That Monday I had run six miles,” Miller said.
“I was supposed to run 10 miles that Wednesday. And so my husband was like, ‘You have to go to the hospital’ and I was like, ‘No, I have to run 10 miles today. I’m not going.’”
That day, Miller — whose blood tests showed no white cell counts — was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that typically reveals itself through fatigue, high temperature, frequent infection and bruising on the skin.
Miller had no telling signs of the illness until she started noticing bruises all over her body.
“I was admitted to Lehigh Valley Hospital on March 15. I started chemo on March 16,” Miller said. “And my world got turned upside-down.”
‘I can’t go from 20 miles to no miles’
Chemotherapy is one of the most common treatments for cancer. With it come side effects, such as intense fatigue, and an indefinite time period of living with the treatment’s toll.
But Miller had another date circled on the calendar — one she wasn’t going to let cancer or chemo get in the way of.
“I did talk to my doctors there because I told them, ‘Listen, I've been training for this half-marathon,’ which was April 23. And I was like, ‘I'm very active. I can't go from 20 miles to no miles.’”
So Miller’s doctors brought her a bike to ride in the hospital, and with it came a sense of stability and normalcy.
“I didn’t run when I was in the hospital. I was discharged from the hospital on April 7, and the St. Luke’s Half Marathon was a couple of weeks away. And I went out on a run and then I did that half-marathon.”
Miller completed the race with a chip time of 2 hours, 19 minutes and 57 seconds. But it was just the beginning of her cancer journey. When she resumed treatment, complications followed. She needed transfusions as her hemoglobin bottomed out, and also had a blood infection.
“I usually say the chemo cancer journey, for me at least, was similar to boxing rounds. You know, the boxer looks pretty good in round one, round two, round three. But round by round, especially the last couple rounds, they look pretty beat up,” she said.
“And so that's actually how I felt in each round, I got progressively sicker and sicker because the chemo was just wearing on your body. But I kept on running as much as I could, for as long as I could.”
"I got progressively sicker and sicker because the chemo was just wearing on your body. But I kept on running as much as I could, for as long as I could.”Amy Miller
She also embraced being a patient instead of a doctor.
“That’s what I was — I had been a doctor, but now I had a cancer doctor and I had become a cancer patient. It was no good fighting or denying it [but] it was good to embrace it, and let the doctors do their job and me, the patient, do my job of going through the treatments and letting others take care of me in this time of need and walking this journey.”
Staying in the race
The act of putting one foot in front of the other gets progressively harder when you lose your strength and energy. And so footsteps replaced miles as goal markers each time Miller ventured outside these last few months.
“The red blood cells are what gives you the hemoglobin, what gives you your strength and energy,” Miller explained. “So if my hemoglobin was eight, and normal is 12 to 16, at less than seven they give you a transfusion.
“So I would find if my hemoglobin was eight, I would be able to run very slowly, probably like a slow walk-run, but I felt like I needed to do it. And so that was what kept me sane, actually … the normalcy of one foot in front of the other really kept me in the cancer race, and you know, the regular race.”
"That was what kept me sane, actually … the normalcy of one foot in front of the other really kept me in the cancer race, and you know, the regular race.”Amy Miller
Miller completed her chemo on Sept. 8, and her last blood transfusion was Sept. 25. Through it all, running was a near-constant as she learned how her body would accommodate a battle against an aggressive opponent.
“There are two types of leukemia. So I do have the more aggressive one, like acute myeloid versus acute lymphoblastic, but all of those are pretty aggressive,” she said.
“Mine was not the most aggressive because I didn't need a stem cell transplant, I just needed chemo. And they were confident that with the chemo, it would, you know, put it into remission.”
Miller received a remission diagnosis and a clean bill of health from her doctors on Oct. 26. She considers herself fortunate to have spent the last nine months receiving treatment at a time when -– thanks to extensive research -– doctors now have a much better understanding of what drives the disease.
“It definitely helps to be within the medical lingo and community, and also just be thankful for medical advancements,” she said, noting her husband is also a physician.
“We moved up here in 2002 to start our medical careers, and we were even saying maybe in 2002, I wouldn't have survived, you know, with the cancer treatments. So, it was also us approaching this knowing that there have been some great advances, and that nowadays, praise God, cancer is not necessarily a death sentence like it would have been 20 or 30 years ago.”
‘Life is a race and a journey’
The course for Sunday’s race is fast and flat — two words runners love to hear. For Miller, it will bookend her journey amid “the glories of autumn.”
“The [half-marathon in April] was not fast or flat, but it was beautiful. I cried a couple miles, and I probably will shed some tears here just because it feels so good to be normal and free,” she said.
“The other thing I would say about my running is during my illness, I felt like lots of things were happening to my body, like my body was getting chemo, my body was getting an infection or my body was getting antibiotics. My body was getting all these things or my body was the recipient of these things. But I felt like with running, my body could actually do something. So that was my sensitivity for being active.”
In that sense, Miller’s tenacity and her story perhaps read like some made-for-TV movie. But she hopes it will encourage people to find something and make it their own to get them through the difficult times.
“Life is a race and a journey, right? Even as we think about this, and it is putting one foot in front of the other, that people can cheer for you and support you, you know, at your sidelines and stuff. But as long as you keep moving until you can't keep moving anymore, is what I would recommend people to do and what you can do right instead of thinking what you can't do.
“We're going into Thanksgiving. You know, what are you going to do with the time you've been given? We don't choose the time that we've been given, but we can choose what we want to do with the time that we have.”
"What are you going to do with the time you've been given?"Amy Miller
She paused for a moment, reflective of her final thoughts.
“As long as there's breath, there's life. And then there's hope to go on, right? And so that's what I would just encourage people to do.”
