THE THING ANYBODY
WITH A SOUL MIGHT
HAVE DONE IS JUST
SAY, ‘WE’RE GOING
TO SHUT THIS DOWN.’
school. After his pediatrician took
a blood test, she called to say that
Blaise should get to a hospital immediately. He was diagnosed with
Burkitt’s leukemia.
He’d spend most of the next
eight months in and out of hospitals getting aggressive chemotherapy, made worse by an
initial misdiagnosis. Burkitt’s
leukemia is so rare that the doctors Blaise initially went to in
Westchester treated him for another type of leukemia.
“I don’t remember the first four
days,” Blaise says, looking towards
his dad to fill in the details. Benza
added that the treatment the hospital provided nearly destroyed
his son’s kidneys and left him on
dialysis temporarily.
Before long, Blaise moved to
another hospital and the repeti-
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
tion of treatments—getting blood
taken by the same nurse, for example—felt normal.
“You have your own routine
that you get used to, so it’s not really scary anymore,” he says.
Blaise couldn’t go outside for
the month of November that year.
Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve
were spent in the hospital, and so
was Christmas, when his family
ordered Chinese food.
“When I did go outside, that
first time, I had to wear a mask
and wasn’t allowed to take the
mask off,” he recalls. “Going outside wasn’t going outside.”
Blaise’s last day of chemo was
in May of 2006. It’s been six
years, and Blaise has had no signs
of cancer. Six feet tall now, he
once weighed only 82 pounds.
“We’re sitting here and Blaise
looks great, and he is great,” Benza says, seated in an apartment
in a Chelsea high-rise where he
lives. Blaise is a senior at Vil-
SUDDEN
DEATH