RECOVERY TIME

Stephanie Bisera, an outfielder getting ready to embark on her last season of high schoolsoftball, didn’t mind the muscle that appeared to be hardening inside her abdomen.

The more it seemed to grow, the harder it got, the more she joked about the benefit of sit-ups. “I’m getting buff,” she told her mother.

It didn’t become apparent something was wrong until Stephanie, a senior at Laguna Hills High, while lying on her back, showed her mother, Paula. This “muscle” stretched from above Stephanie’s navel down the length of her abdomen, ranging from hip to hip, and had nothing to do with sit-ups.

“When she felt it,” Stephanie said of her mom, “she freaked out.”

That was the first time Stephanie Bisera got scared.

It was a tumor, larger than a cantaloupe, that had attached to one of Bisera’s ovaries. Her softball season ended immediately.

Bisera first told her teammates it was an ovarian cyst because that’s what doctors had said. As she learned more, she told more to friends. Four days later, doctors told her to be prepared for cancer.

“You’re at a loss for words,” Laguna Hills Coach Cary Crouch said. “How can this kid be standing there that tough telling me that?”

Doctors believed Bisera had a germ cell tumor and told the Biseras that in girls Stephanie’s age, it was always malignant.

“She was telling us how she thought she was getting fat, then she thought they were stomach muscles, and then it felt lumpy,” first baseman Meghan O’Donnell recalled of a teary-eyed team meeting. “We all checked our stomachs that day.”

Twelve days after Paula Bisera determined something was terribly wrong, an April 1 surgery to remove the cellular fibroma tumor--with the expectation that it was malignant--showed it wasn’t.

A surgeon walked into the waiting room an hour into an operation that had been expected to go more than four, to tell Paula and her husband Guy that their daughter was going to be all right.

Crouch got a phone call at school, left his classroom and didn’t stop until he was at Stephanie’s side. Notes passed among teammates informed them of the good news.

Stephanie Bisera turned 18 on Sunday.

This is the second time she has missed a softball season because of an operation. She had two brain surgeries, while 11 and 15, and this setback seemed just another test to the resolve of a spunky fighter who admits she is already “living on borrowed time.”

“I feel all this stuff is happening for a reason,” Bisera said. “It has made me a stronger person today. I feel that I’m a lucky person. I’m not supposed to be alive today. The doctors have told me that.

“I should have died back in the [summer before] sixth grade. I’m very blessed.”

If she is blessed, then she is surely remarkable.

Doctors cannot remove a cyst that has grown deep inside her brain.

Her first surgery came after she had lapsed into a coma for two days. The cyst had ruptured after she was hit in the head with a beach ball. Doctors connected an external shunt to drain the excess fluid around her brain.

The second brain surgery, during her freshman year, relieved the cyst’s pressure on the major artery supplying blood to her brain and causing her dizziness.

“If it had completely blocked the blood flow of the carotid artery,” Paula Bisera said, “it would have killed her.”

Stephanie does have some side effects from the surgeries. Her left eye is weak. She loses her balance if she stands with her eyes closed. She can’t wink. In all, pretty lucky.

Her resiliency plays well at Laguna Hills, where her sunny disposition is a model for many.

She visited school on April 23 to be named to the Prom Court, and returned to classes on April 28. One of those who had been by Bisera’s side nearly every day during her recovery was Corrinne Gastel, a senior classmate who said Bisera’s teammates seemed to learn how to be strong, but also how to lean on each other.

“I think they realize now that life is really precious,” said Gastel, who didn’t play this season so she could work. “I think being so young, we don’t realize that life is full of really great things, but it’s also filled with a lot of hardships. Once you get past the hardships, the little things that used to bother you before don’t bother you so much.”

One of the lessons Gastel learned: “Anything could go wrong no matter how young or old you are. You never know when your time is coming up.”

That’s a truth the Biseras know too well.

“You can’t imagine what this child has been through in such a short little life span,” Paula Bisera said. “I feel she is stronger than I am. I wish I had the strength she had. To see her smiling no matter how bad things are going, it keeps me going.”

There’s a reason Paula Bisera needs something to keep her going.

Her daughter’s surgery was April 1. Paula’s sister, Claudia, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on April 9. Paula’s oldest daughter, Melissa, 19, was in a head-on collision April 11, though sustained only minor injuries. On April 13, doctors told Claudia she probably had six months or less to live. That same day, Paula’s brother, Jim Brott, died unexpectedly from a hole in his heart while battling pneumonia; he had been scheduled for surgery four days later. Brott didn’t tell any family members about his heart condition or the surgery.

“It’s really difficult to handle,” Paula said, “but we’ll get through it.”

*

The loss of Stephanie Bisera isn’t the only hardship that befell Laguna Hills’ softball team.

Bisera, an outfielder, is a team co-captain with shortstop Erin Larsen. It was Bisera who helped to hold the team together when it lost Larsen for 10 days. Larsen was consumed, along with her family, by the discovery of bone cancer in her brother’s leg after it broke while playing kickball. Erik Larsen, 11, has an osteosarcoma cancer, the most curable bone cancer.

Bisera had joked with Erik for years that he was her boyfriend, which the young boy loudly disputed. The Biseras and Larsens are close.

The Larsen’s situation, during which Erin missed playing in the Laguna Hills tournament, came on the heels of losing the services of outfielder Leslie Simien for a week. She missed the season-opening Brea Olinda tournament because of her great-grandmother’s funeral in Louisiana.

Bisera’s problems coincided with with Larsen’s return.

“It’s like, ‘OK, now what?’ ” O’Donnell recalled. “We seniors would sit together at practice and just ask ourselves, ‘Why are we even here? This is really meaningless.’ ”

Crouch said his 25th year of coaching has been unlike any other, not because of the wins and losses, but because they don’t matter the way they have in the past. Factored into practices along with hitting and fielding, he said, was time “for general commiseration.”

“We’ve been having the kind of year where what’s going on on the field isn’t nearly as important as what’s going on off the field,” Crouch said.

“It’s been an amazing year, a tough year. Focusing on the game wasn’t as important as trying to live through what we we’re going through.”

Laguna Hills was picked No. 10 in The Times Orange County’s preseason rankings, but got off to an understandably slow start. Now 14-7, the Hawks have won eight of their last nine games and are unbeaten in the Pacific Coast League.

The entire experience, from Simien to Larsen to Bisera, has been an exercise in emotional support for players and their families.

When the season is over, players will take away something more valuable than knowing the fine art of slap bunting.

“It was really eye-opening,” O’Donnell said. “We’re thinking about softball and our senior year, and all of a sudden, they have their lives in jeopardy because of cancer. It makes you realize how important each and every one of us are.”

Said Larsen: “I didn’t know people could care so much.”

Because there was about a seven-day period when Bisera’s tumor was thought to be cancerous, Bisera wanted to keep the news from the Larsens. However, Erin Larsen eventually heard the rumor and asked if it were true.

Bisera told her more than likely.

During Bisera’s absence, Larsen drew much closer to Kimberly Bisera, a freshman right fielder and Stephanie’s younger sister.

“I tried to take her under my wing,” said Larsen, who played on Laguna Hills’ state championship basketball team last year. “When her mom was at the hospital, I would pick her up and take her to school and support her the way they had supported us the week before.

“We talked about what was going on, and we could relate to each other, talk about the unknown.”

Erik Larsen began his fourth chemotherapy session Wednesday and appears to be doing well. Stephanie Bisera is the Hawks’ scorekeeper. She can begin playing again this summer, and in the fall will attend the University of San Diego on a softball scholarship.

*

Bisera’s remaining ovary shows signs of a potential tumor formation, so doctors will monitor it closely. Her first post-surgical checkup is Monday. She had strong input into some of the decisions her parents provided to guide doctors.

“It scares me not having kids,” said Bisera, who comes from a family of four children and plans on having several. Taking egg donations is an option should she lose the other ovary. Before her surgery, she already had decided doctors could remove her uterus if necessary. It was a painful decision.

“I feel like it’s something I shouldn’t even have to be dealing with at my age,” she said. “I’ve gone through two brain surgeries and now I have to make decisions about things that may affect me in 10 years. For me, 10 years is a long ways away.”

But Bisera’s mother is convinced all this happened for a reason.

“She has always said that she wants to enter the medical field,” Paula said, “and I believe she will be in children’s medicine. That’s what I believe.”

Stephanie has her own ideas about why she seems to be the chosen one.

“If I didn’t have a good spirit, I would be bringing everyone else down,” she said. “I need to show people that they don’t need to feel sorry for me. I can make it through.

“When everyone found out about it, it’s like, ‘Everything happens to you.’ But in a way, it’s better that this whole thing happened to me because I know how to handle this type of situation.

“It’s happened to me before.”