Aussie model Lisa Seiffart on her breast cancer battle driving latest philanthropic art effort
Model and cancer survivor Lisa Seiffert’s experience in and out of hospital has led her to launch a program providing art to Royal Hospital for Women in Randwick to create “an escape” for patients in tough situations
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Model Lisa Seiffert will launch Art for Healing at Sydney’s Royal Hospital for Women in Randwick on Wednesday.
The philanthropic program is Seiffert’s brainchild and a labour of love, which
she devised while undergoing treatment for stage-two breast cancer at the hospital.
The 41-year-old, who is now in remission, was visiting family in Queensland in 2022 when
doctors found a 1cm lump in her right chest during a routine check up.
“I had no signs or symptoms. My world stopped in a moment,” she told The Daily Telegraph.
“You’re never expecting to get diagnosed with cancer.”
“I lost my aunty to breast cancer, so I’ve always been overly cautious. I started getting mammograms when I turned 35.”
Seiffert has lived most of her life in the United States, moving to New York City when she was just 16.
Due to the exorbitant price of healthcare in the United States, her diagnosis changed everything.
“I avoided chemotherapy,” she said.
“I did a lumpectomy and then 19 rounds of radiotherapy. I’ll be on medication for the next five years.
“I cannot fathom what the cost of treatment would have been in the US. I’m so glad and grateful I was at home when I got diagnosed,” Seiffert said.
“I’m so lucky I got checked when I got checked.”
After renting an apartment in Potts Point, and listing her New York loft on Airbnb, Seiffert said she was “thrown into a vortex” of specialist appointments and tests, five days per week.
“That becomes your full-time job, getting through that,” she said.
“I’d be sitting in a room getting PET scans or MRIs or blood tests and I’d be filled with so much anxiety and doubt and fear.”
“Once they had to put five needles in my boob and inject me with radioactive liquid. I didn’t want to see them do it. I kept looking around the room and all there was on the wall was a diagram of a breast.”
The singular question that popped into her head then became her driving force: ‘Why isn’t there art?’
“The whole hospital environment can be really drab and soulless. To have something to look at when you’re being poked and prodded means so much,” Seiffert said. “It’s an escape.”
Backed by her oncologist to pursue the project, she set about contacting local artists to ask whether they had any paintings to spare, or desire to contribute.
As of Thursday, there are now more than 20 art works hanging in the hospital’s breast centre and oncology ward.
Artists Tim Olsen, Otis Carey, Belynda Henry and James Houston were the first to contribute.
It is her hope that the program will attract enough support to eventually touch all the wards.
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