Much of Heather's life was spent coping with cancer, but the disease that ultimately took her life never took away her spunk.

In 1990, at age 7, Heather was diagnosed with optic glioma, a tumor in her optic nerve. Radiation and other treatments at the University of Minnesota Children's Hospital, Fairview successfully treated the cancer but left her blind in one eye. Over the next several years, Heather, her two sisters and her father, David, cautiously celebrated the victory.

"She loved swimming and biking with her friends," says David. "As she came out of junior high, she loved working at McDonald's, she liked that empowerment." As a career, Heather talked about becoming a pediatrician.

Then, in 1999, she started feeling sick again and went to a local clinic for an examination. "She was really lethargic and tired," recalls David. "At first, they (doctors) thought it was mono."

On a hunch, David called the University of Minnesota Children's Hospital and scheduled an MRI. Though it was unrelated to the previous cancer, the test confirmed Heather had another tumor, this one the size of a golf ball, in her brain.

Heather started aggressive chemotherapy. The treatments made her so sick that physicians put her under heavy sedation in the pediatric intensive care unit. That's when she earned a special nickname: Spunky Trooper.

The first part of the name came from a Beanie Baby, also named Spunky, which Heather had picked out just before she was admitted to the ICU. According to David, Heather liked holding the Beanie Baby in her hand and always held tight to it, despite the heavy sedation.

The second part of the nickname came from her father. "I used to push her bed away from the wall a little bit so I could go forehead to forehead, upside down to one another, and pray with her or to her," David says. "I'd tell her to keep fighting and to be a trooper, and somehow it morphed into the name. It came to be who she was, and symbolized how she fought."

The medical staff picked up on the name and, when Heather was moved to different places in the unit, they would make signs for her new room reading, "Welcome Back, Spunky Trooper."

While Heather was aware that her cancer could kill her, "she never completely grabbed any fear around that," says David. Instead, she focused her worries on the other kids undergoing treatment. To help raise funds for Children's Cancer Research Fund, Heather and her family volunteered to tell their story for the KS95 for Kids Radiothon several times before Heather succumbed to the disease on Jan. 25, 2004.

"She just had an incredible unselfish endurance about her," says David. "She'd say, they gotta find a cure for this."

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