Blaise Benza, 21, a former Briarcliff student,
battled for eight months with leukemia.
lanova. His persistence, or stubbornness, allowed him to move
ahead with his peers to the 10th
grade, even though he spent the
majority of 9th grade at Columbia
University Medical Center.
It also cost $1.5 million to pay
for his treatment and months of
aggressive chemotherapy to get
him to where he is now.
“We’re not sure if he can have
children because of the timeliness of this whole thing. We
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don’t know the long term effects
that this illness had on his heart,
his system in total,” Benza says.
“So while we are very thankful that he is here and we’re
thrilled, we don’t know what the
long term effect is. To kind of say
that he’s healed, and that’s all
we want, well, that’s not really
all we want.”
The Benzas have not filed a
lawsuit against Briarcliff but they
haven’t dismissed the idea either.
“If I had found out two years
ago, before they closed the whole
thing down that these kids were
sick and I didn’t know about it, I
SUDDEN
DEATH