cancer patient Miranda Mead smiling and sitting on her bed at homeOn Miranda Mead's 16th birthday she failed her driving test.

Although she had been looking forward to getting her license for a long time, Miranda couldn't sit without being in pain, and the sporadic numbness in her leg made it worse.

In the spring of her freshman year, Miranda suffered a hard fall on her tailbone. By autumn, although still in pain, she ran on her high school's cross-country team in Wayzata, Minnesota. By the end of the season, the excruciating pain in her back forced Miranda to stop running. Two days after her birthday, when the periodic numbness in her left leg and foot evolved into a complete loss of feeling, she knew it was something more. Read the rest of Miranda's story.