Softball
Favorite athlete: Shane Victorino
Favorite team: Flyers
Favorite memory competing in sports: One of my favorite memories is from last high school season was when we beat Pennsbury for the first time in about 17 years.
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: In my first school game back at Pennsbury High School, I ran on a dropped third strike, and when I got to first base, I tripped and landed on my hands and knees. Even though it was really embarrassing, I couldn’t stop laughing when I got in the dugout.
Music on iPod: Mostly Country
Future plans: Go to nursing school and then become a pediatric oncology nurse.
Words to live by: “Life was throwing curve balls at me left and right, but then God gave me a bat and showed me how to swing.”
One goal before turning 30: Get a nursing job working with kids.
One thing people don’t know about me: I worry that my cancer may be back if I have a bruise for too long or if I’m sick for a long period of time.
By Mary Jane Souder
“Life was throwing curve balls at me left and right, but then God gave me a bat and showed me how to swing.”
Dan Schram calls Stephanie Yost an inspiration.
“Sometimes I take softball a little too seriously,” the Bensalem softball coach said. “I just look at Steph, and I remember – this is a kids’ game, and it’s a great game, and we’re all blessed to play it.”
Yost is passionate about softball, but ask the senior infielder if she is looking forward to her final high school season this spring, and her response might surprise you.
“I’m not too eager because I want to save it,” she said.
Yost’s perspective is different than most of her peers. While many can’t wait to move on to the next chapter of their lives, the Bensalem senior would like this one to last longer.
“I’m excited to play, but it’s senior year, and I’ve missed a lot,” she said.
The high value Yost places on every second of her high school softball experience is born out of her courageous battle against Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) that kept her off the diamond and in and out of CHOP as a freshman, but she is a survivor, one of the fortunate ones.
“That changed a lot of things,” Yost said. “There are days when I’m like, ‘I don’t really feel like doing this’ and then I think back to all the kids that are still in (the hospital) that don’t get a chance to do it.”
Yost’s story begins like that of many of her peers. She grew up playing softball and soccer. Initially, she played in-house softball for Valley AA and then moved on to the Valley Blaze travel team. She switched to Philly Flash in ninth grade, and as a freshman at Bensalem, she immediately threw herself into Schram’s offseason workouts.
“It was a bit of a shock to have the hard workouts and the harder coaching,” Yost said. “Once we got into it a month or two, it was a little bit easier.”
Yost, according to Schram, never missed a session.
“Some of the freshmen were just so blown away by the work ethic we maintained that only a couple of them really, really could stick with the program,” the Owls’ coach said. “One of them was Stephanie.
“Stephanie was with us from September all the way through March, and she worked really, really hard.”
In January of that year, Yost got a bad cold she could not shake.
“I never totally recovered from it,” she said. “I started to get more tired.
“I just thought I had a cold, and it was going to go away soon. I really didn’t think anything of it.”
In late March, she came down with a fever that didn’t subside.
“My mom had doctors run blood work, and they found it,” she said of her diagnosis of AML on April 2, 2013. “Initially, I cried, but then I decided I’m not going to let this beat me. I’m going to get through it, and I’m going to get back to everything that I was before.”
Schram remembers the day he received word about Yost’s diagnosis as if it were yesterday. The Owls were on the road at Pennsbury, and when they returned to Bensalem, they gathered in the locker room.
“It was probably my saddest day ever coaching,” the Owls’ coach said. “We went upstairs to the gym locker room, and I told the girls.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. It was very sad, very surreal. A lot of tears, a lot of questions. It was almost too much for the kids to bear. They really didn’t understand what it was all about at that point. Over the next few weeks, we really came together as a unit. The kids were all united.”
Although Yost didn’t notice, she says she lost close to 60 pounds between November and April.
“Looking back at pictures now you can see I was almost a yellow color,” she said.
Yost was in the hospital for weeks at a time during intense rounds of chemo.
“I was getting four or five different chemos,” she said. “I would get a week of chemo, and then I’d be in the hospital for another month at least.
“After my first round of chemo, they decided that I needed a stem cell transplant. By the end of my second round, they found an unrelated donor that matched me perfectly. It was pretty quick.”
During a rare stint at home between chemo sessions, Yost attended her team’s game against Council Rock 
North.
“When I got to the game, it was the first time that I had seen everyone since my diagnosis so it was a little strange at first,” said Yost. “Then coach Schram asked me to be the captain and it was nice to feel like I was still a part of the team. That in itself meant so much to me.”
“It was a big game for us,” Schram said. “She was very, very frail.
“It was right in the middle of her going for treatment. I remember very distinctly just holding back tears the entire time just seeing her there with us. We won the game. It was a special time.”
In July, Yost attended an indoor practice.
“The last time she had played for Bensalem prior to that – she was in gym one, and she did all of her practices in the gym,” Schram said. “That always bothered me that she couldn’t be out on the field.
“It was a moral victory to bring her back, and we could do some hitting and throwing, and I knew at that point she was coming back to us, and she was coming back in a big way.”
After her three rounds of chemo were completed, Yost was admitted to CHOP for the stem cell transplant in August of 2013.
“I went in for radiation and chemo that killed my bone marrow,” she said. “Then I had my stem cell transplant.”
Yost was hospitalized for close to two months. She developed engraftment syndrome and graft versus host disease.
“I also got mucositis, which kind of tore up my whole digestive tract,” she said. “I became lactose intolerant for a good nine months.”
But Yost was on the road to recovery.
*****
The road to recovery was not always an easy one. Yost also dealt with MRSA during and briefly after her treatments were completed.
“The doctors believe that that's what my fever was from,” Yost said. “They also found that where the MRSA was that some of the leukemia had been there too, so they think that is part of the reason why it took a little bit longer to heal besides my counts constantly dropping.”
She was home schooled her sophomore year, and a week or two before softball tryouts, Yost went to her first practice. Her return to the softball diamond marked the beginning of a return to normalcy.
“I was really eager,” she said. “I had started physical therapy in December, and it got me back enough that I could keep up enough with everybody else, but I still couldn’t run right.
“I had temperature problems from the transplant so I would overheat a lot.”
Yost played jayvee her sophomore year.
“By the end of April and beginning of May, I started to get my feet back under me and back in the swing,” she said.
In November of Yost’s junior year, her softball squad participated in the Light the Night Walk at the 
Philadelphia Art Museum, sponsoring their teammate.
“Every year we’re now having a cancer awareness game,” Schram said. “Last year we played Archbishop Ryan, and we wore orange and black to represent leukemia.
“There’s a girl on my team whose mom just passed away from pancreatic cancer, and this year we’re going to wear purple. This came about because of the struggle Steph went through and just reminding us of what we’re doing and why we’re here.”
As a junior, Yost was a contributing varsity player, beginning the year as the designated player but finding a home at second base.
“She’s a very good hitter,” Schram said. “The first game she started varsity in the field at second base since coming back – I believe she was 5-for-5 and won the Bucks County Courier Times Player of the Week.
“It was unbelievable. I get goose bumps thinking about it.”
*****
Yost will be a key player on this year’s varsity. She is no longer on any medication but still has checkups every four months. When Yost talks about her experiences, there is no trace of anger, no ‘why me?’ Her singular focus was on getting well.
“My parents didn’t tell me anything that was going to worry me,” she said. “They kind of said I had a good chance of beating it because of how little I had in my system.
“They said if I would have waited a week it could have progressed 10 times worse.”
“She’s just an absolute inspiration to all of us,” Schram said. “The entire Yost family – they’re so grateful and thankful every time I talk to them.
“I don’t think they really know how grateful and thankful I am for them. They make you feel more like a person, they make you remember what it’s all about.”
Yost maintains contact with several of the patients she met at CHOP.
“I’ve lost a few friends too,” she said. “The most recent was in July. That was tough. I couldn’t really go out and talk to people when I was in the hospital because I was in isolation. He was kind of the closest one to me.”
Yost’s career goal of becoming a nurse was inspired by one her nurses whose name is Tina.
“She had almost the exact same thing I had so she really helped me through a lot of it,” said Yost, who has applied to Drexel University and is awaiting word.
According to her coach, the school that inherits Yost will be fortunate
“She’s an amazing student, and she’s an amazing school citizen,” Schram said. “She plays in the school orchestra, she’s a natural born leader, good to everyone around her, humble.
“She just very, very intelligent, tactful and articulate. She’s a very special wonderful person.”
