Last February, doctors found a tumor behind Peabody-native Chris Sakelakos’ knee. In May, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, an aggressive type of bone cancer, and received a 12-hour surgery to completely replace his knee.
Almost a year after that surgery and after rehab, treatment, and the cancer spreading to his lungs, Chris Sakelakos’ brother, Mark Sakelakos, and his wife, Emily Sakelakos, set up a GoFundMe page to hopefully pay for the medical expenses and to support the family.
“When the GoFundMe started, we kind of kept it to close-net friends and family who really only knew about it,” Mark Sakelakos said. “He was weighing his options of what to do next, whether to go holistic or go to Dana Farber or MGH, and I think that’s when Chris and Christina, his wife, said, ‘All right, let’s do the GoFundMe because we don’t know how to say ‘no’ anymore.’”
When Mark Sakelakos was asked to run the page, he was quick to accept the responsibility, and on April 1, the fundraiser was set with a $10,000 goal.
However, no one in the Sakelakos family could predict the speed at which people donated, and within two hours, they doubled their goal. Now, it stands at just below $125,000 and is rising by the hour.
“At the end of the first day, we were at like $75,000, and we were like, ‘holy smokes,’” Mark Sakelakos said. “We were shocked. There’s not even enough words to describe our reaction.”
Scrolling through the names of donors on the GoFundMe page, the list of individuals and communities touched by Chris Sakelakos in some way seems to be almost endless.
Even though Chris Sakelakos, a teacher at Lynnfield High School, hasn’t been in a classroom since his diagnosis, his passion for learning becomes apparent with the well wishes and support his students are sending his way.
“His college friends, my college friends, our parents’ friends, coworkers and students, and all these people, it was incredible to see,” Mark Sakelakos said. “It just spread like fire. It was overwhelming, I’m not gonna lie to you. There were a lot of tears in our family to see the love and support that came that way.
The family has also seen neighbors and friends around Peabody come together to support Chris Sakelakos as he battles cancer, plowing his yard of snow, driving him to appointments, and just making sure his family, including his three and six-year-old daughters, have everything they need.
“We weren’t looking for $100,000. If we got $1,000, really any type of support would have been nice, and we’d be thankful for it. To see that much, It blows your way,” Mark Sakelakos. “It takes a village to get there. We always knew we had a village, but we didn’t know we had an army behind us.”
To donate and help Chris Sakelakos and his family as he battles cancer, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-chriss-battle-against-osteosarcoma.
