More than a decade after a Bay Minette toddler’s fight with leukemia drew attention across the Gulf Coast, Starla Chapman has a new title: Miss Area Women Action Group.
Chapman, now a senior at Baldwin County High School, won the pageant this past weekend at Coastal Alabama Community College. This year marked the 30th year of the Miss Area Women Action Group pageant, often called Miss AWAG, a long-running Baldwin County tradition.
The crown is the latest milestone for a young woman who calls herself a “walking miracle.” She has had no recurrence of the cancer she was diagnosed with as a toddler.
A Diagnosis Just Before Her Third Birthday
Chapman was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia on Sept. 13, 2011, shortly before she turned 3. Her family noticed unexplained bruising and leg pain, and a bone marrow test confirmed the diagnosis. She began chemotherapy at USA Children’s & Women’s Hospital in Mobile.
Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Leukemia is the most common cancer in children, according to the American Cancer Society, but most childhood leukemias are a different type, acute lymphoblastic leukemia. AML is less common in children and generally requires very intensive chemotherapy.
For Chapman, that treatment was especially hard. The chemotherapy weakened her heart so severely that it stopped, and she died in her father’s arms before doctors were able to restart it. She went through six rounds of chemotherapy, and doctors had doubted she would be strong enough to finish. She completed treatment, and her cancer went into remission in the spring of 2012.
A Christmas Eve Visit and a Yellow Bracelet
During her treatment, Chapman formed a friendship that made her story known well beyond Baldwin County.
On Christmas Eve 2011, then-University of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron and his family visited young cancer patients at USA Children’s & Women’s Hospital. McCarron, a Mobile native, met Starla, who was wearing a tiny Alabama cheerleader uniform. She gave him a bright yellow bracelet printed with her family’s motto: “Just Trust.”
McCarron wore the bracelet in the 2012 BCS National Championship Game against LSU at the Superdome in New Orleans on Jan. 9, 2012. Alabama won the game 21-0, and McCarron was named the game’s offensive most valuable player. Their friendship became one of the most widely shared stories of that championship season.
The bond lasted well beyond that game, and Chapman’s story continued to inspire families facing childhood cancer.
Next: Spelman College and Medicine
Chapman has big plans after graduation. She plans to attend Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically Black college for women, and pursue a career in medicine.
Her goal is to become a hematologist, a physician who specializes in diagnosing and treating diseases of the blood and blood-forming tissues, including leukemia. She has said she wants to save lives the way her doctors saved hers. Pediatric hematologist-oncologists are the specialists who lead treatment for children with leukemia, so she hopes to someday do the kind of work that carried her through treatment.
The path to becoming a hematologist is a long one. It usually includes four years of college, four years of medical school, a residency in internal medicine or pediatrics, and then a fellowship in hematology or hematology-oncology.
Childhood Cancer Survivorship Today
Chapman’s pageant win came at the end of September, which is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. At the hospital where she was treated, more than a dozen children who finished cancer treatment in the past year rang a bronze bell on Sept. 23 to mark the end of treatment. Families also gathered for the hospital’s third annual Childhood Cancer Reunion.
Survival has improved dramatically over the past several decades. According to the National Cancer Institute, about 85% of children diagnosed with cancer now survive at least five years. The cancer death rate for children and adolescents younger than 20 fell by more than half between 1975 and 2022.
Survivors still often need long-term follow-up care. Some chemotherapy drugs used to treat childhood cancers can affect the heart and other organs, so survivors are commonly monitored for years after treatment. Chapman’s story is one of the many reasons doctors and families continue to push for research, better treatments and support for families.
A Hometown Celebration
For many people on the Gulf Coast who followed Starla’s story as a toddler in a cheerleader uniform, seeing her crowned as a high school senior is a happy turn. In her own words, she is a walking miracle.