When Blair Bennet walked the runway at Dunedin Fine Art Center’s Wearable Art fashion show in August, her stage presence was immediately apparent — a function not just of her striking beauty, but of something else not quite definable: a confidence that she was right where she belonged.
Later, when we approached her about being part of CL’s fashion show to benefit St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital and its Shimberg Breast Center, we were surprised to learn she was only 17 — and that she had been a cancer patient at St. Joe’s herself.
The confidence she exuded on stage was no act; it was hard-earned, the reflection of a survivor’s spirit.
Abandoned at birth by her biological mother at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Bennet was a preemie, only 3.8 pounds, born with cocaine in her system and her intestines on the outside of her body.
Her adoptive parents, Bill and Debra Witter, got the news at the hospital as they were preparing to adopt.
“My wife and I, when they told us all this negative stuff at the hospital,” remembers Witter, “we looked at each other and said, ‘Why are we here?’ But soon as we saw her face, we said, ‘We’re toast.’”
Bennet (her modeling name) survived that inauspicious beginning only to be diagnosed with leukemia at age 7. She and her father, speaking to CL during breaks in the fashion shoot, stated the exact date of the diagnosis almost in unison: January 4, 2007.
“She just came through all this crap,” says her father, “and now we get nailed at 7 with leukemia.”
The symptoms, says Bennet, were “kind of gory”: “nosebleeds so bad that it looked like a murder scene in my room.” There were bumps on her head and bruises all over her body, and she had trouble walking. “Everything was super-sore.”
But it wasn’t till after multiple emergency room visits that a doctor at the Mease Dunedin Hospital ER recognized the signs of leukemia. She was sent off immediately to All Children’s.
“The doctors [there] said her marrow was like paste,” says Witter. “She had maybe a couple of weeks.”
From then on, until she was 10 years old, she endured treatment after treatment, first at All Children’s and later at St. Joe’s.
Through all this, her spirit manifested itself not only in the way she fought the disease but in how she communicated to the world.
“I think in the beginning I didn’t know what was going on,” she recalls. “The word ‘cancer’ to me, I thought, ‘Oh, OK, maybe it’s like a flu kind of thing.’ But then, when I started getting spinals and taking all the pills and losing all my hair, that’s when I kinda woke up and was like, ‘Whoa, this is way bigger than I ever thought it would be.’ So then I just knuckled down and was like, you know what, I have so much I want to do in my life, I can’t let this stop me.”
She walked in her first runway show (Fashion Funds the Cure at Saks Fifth Avenue) when she was 7, and bald.
“‘Hey Dad, can I be a model?’” she remembers asking after the show.
“I said, ‘Sure,' anything to keep her going,” says Witter. But on some level, because of her self-assurance, he believed she could actually realize her dream.
She held on to that dream even as her treatments grew more and more grueling.
Steroid injections made her bones so brittle that she suffered multiple broken bones in her back, ankle and both legs when she was 8. The injections, which began before she transferred to St. Joe’s, were eventually discontinued upon secondary evaluations at other hospitals, including New York’s Sloan-Kettering. But until then, she not only endured, she took matters into her own hands, insisting, with her mother’s support (and against the objections of nurses) on injecting the needles herself. (Remember, she was 8.)
She had to be home-schooled because her immune system was so compromised. “I had no hair, and I was all puffy from the steroids, and people would look at me like I was some sort of diseased animal — it was bad.”
But she wouldn’t give up. “Even when I was in so much pain I couldn’t breathe, I would just keep going and going and going.”
In remission since the treatments ended, she began to realize in 8th grade that she was entering a new phase. “I put on a dress my mom gave me for a dance at my school and put on my makeup and hair and said, ‘Wow, I’ve changed a lot.’”
She’s changed so much, in fact, that it’s hard for some to believe what she went through as a child.
“Everyone’s like, ‘I can’t imagine you with cancer. I can’t see that.’ I have to show them my port scar and explain it.”
She’s more determined than ever to become a professional model. Besides taking performing arts classes at Dunedin Fine Art Center (her teacher there, Kirsten Walker, asked her to walk in Wearable Art), she was given a scholarship to Barbizon Modeling School. She’s looking forward to walking again in Fashion Funds the Cure — as a survivor, not a patient — and is looking toward a career in New York.
Maintaining her confidence and sense of control for so many years, even with people poking and jabbing at her and telling her what to do — it sounds like ideal preparation for the world of professional modeling, where there’s no physical jabbing (one hopes) but a lot of cutting of the psychological variety. Is she ready for that?
“Yes,” she replies immediately. “I have scars, obviously from cancer. And modeling is all about perfection, which I don’t have, technically. But I’m not going to let that stop me. I want to do high fashion, I want to do Victoria’s Secret, even though I’m not the definition of perfection.”
“I think you are,” says her dad.
We think so, too.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.