Postscript : Life’s a High Note Again for Vista Girl Who Battled Bone Disease

Four years ago, Stephanie Robeck was a gravely ill 12-year-old, living a life filled with doctors, hospitals and blood transfusions.

Today she is a perfectly normal teen-ager, “always on the phone,” her mother reports. Or else she is borrowing the car to dash off somewhere.

Stephanie contracted hepatitis B sometime in her pre-teen, tomboy years and came down with aplastic anemia, an often fatal disease in which the bone marrow ceases to produce the blood cells and platelets needed to sustain life.

Fortunately for Stephanie, her pediatrician questioned whether the abundance of bruises and frequent “sniffles” the youngster complained of were just normal growing-up symptoms. He did some medical detective work and traced the cause to the rare blood disease in its early stages.

For Stephanie, who always was an extra-active youngster, the illness meant isolation from her friends and classes for almost two years, her mother, Marilyn Robeck, recalled.

It also meant painful bone marrow transplants from her older sister, Candace, who--luckily for Stephanie--was a perfect match. Then there were three months of slow recuperation at the University of Washington’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The ordeal did not end with Stephanie’s triumphant return to Vista in March, 1982. A couple of months later she was back in the hospital, her body fighting off an attack from the healthy bone marrow transplants from her sister, a reaction that could have ended her life if it had occurred earlier in her recuperation period.

“It was awful,” Marilyn Robeck said. “Her weight got down to around 60 pounds. She looked like one of those starving children you see in pictures.”

But Stephanie’s pluck and her family’s support saw her through that crisis too.

After months more of bed rest and recuperation, she finally was able to join her classmates for middle school graduation, having kept up her studies with the help of a tutor provided by the Vista Unified School District.

The 5-foot-2, 102-pound 16-year-old does not want to talk about those days of illness. She’s too busy getting on with her life--and she knows where she is going.

She now is a junior at Vista High School, and music is her life. She plays the trumpet, takes private music lessons and is in the Vista High School Regimental Marching Band.

Sports, once a big thing in her life, have lost out to hours of daily practicing and, of course, school work. She hopes to earn a music scholarship and attend California State University, Long Beach, after high school.

She wants to be a music teacher, a profession she has recently taken up by giving trumpet lessons to a neighbor boy.

The family still has a few scars left from Stephanie’s long ordeal, “but they are little ones,” Marilyn Robeck said.

They have sold their home and moved to a smaller one, “because it was just too much with all the medical bills.” In addition, “my husband’s business suffered” from his long absences when Stephanie’s parents alternated between living at home and near the Washington State hospital during their daughter’s long convalescence “so she wouldn’t be alone,” she said.

“But we are all together now and we are all healthy,” she concluded. “And we don’t have to worry any more when Stephanie gets the sniffles.”