Monday’s Metro story…

Jason LaMonaca always had a nervous stomach, so the nausea brought on by a roast-pork feast after a Nov. 2006 Eagles game wasn’t much concern. He’d wait till after Thanksgiving to see a doctor. The holiday brought 10 hours of gastro-intenstinal hell with blood in his stool and a colonoscopy.

“I literally came out of the anesthesia to the sound of my aunt [who works at Mercy Health at Fitzgerald Hospital] crying,” LaMonaca, 38, said. “They told me I had a tumor in my colon, most-likely cancerous.”

Ever since, it’s been an up-and-down battle. Months of chemotherapy defeat the tumor. “Victory parties” raise money for other cancer patients. Kidney stones or woes arrive. Tumor returns. Repeat twice.

“It started as good-week, bad-week. It got to be good-day, bad-day. Then, it’s good-hour, bad-hour,” he said. It’s never been a “You have X months to live” type of situation, but June 17 brought some really bad hours.

After a doctor at Jefferson said the clinical-trial/chemo regiment wasn’t working, it was onto figuring out the next step. When he got back to his mother’s house in Folcroft, the side door was kicked in and unknown burglars made off with jewelry, collectibles and $1,700 that three friends recently raised in his honor. He thought the money was more to keep “paying it forward” to cancer patients in need of financial support. “I didn’t realize that I was the one who needed it now,” he said.

Phone lines were cut to disable the alarm and neighbors told LaMonica two men broke in while one waited in the truck outside. (Calls for comment from Folcroft police, who were on the scene within minutes, went unreturned this weekend.)

“I wouldn’t say it’s defeatist, but this all has been a crushing blow,” said LaMonica, who restarts chemotherapy on July 8. “Makes me wonder if I was some evil person in a previous life.”

Sidebar:
Jen Creaven, Jackie Reynolds and Shannon Miriello call themselves “Jason’s Butt Buddies.” They had a friend in need, trained to run a half-marathon at the May 16 Wilmington (Del.) Running Festival and raised more than $2,000.

“Our friend’s children donated their tooth-fairy money. My own nephew Jimmy emptied his piggy bank,” Creaven said. On hearing about the reported burglary, she added, “We were enraged.”

So, the Buddies already launched a website (http://jasonsangels.chipin.com/jason-lamonaca) and a Facebook page (Let’s Help Jason LaMonaca). Checks have started arriving at the P.O. Box they set up and two freestyle concerts are in the works for August.

(Here’s the link.)