By Gary Lloyd
A yard sale benefitting a Clay teen with cancer will be Saturday.
A yard sale in the parking lot of NorthPark Baptist Church on Deerfoot Parkway will begin at 8 a.m. The yard sale will benefit Justin Sipka, a Clay-Chalkville High School senior who has been battling osteosarcoma for nearly two years.
Sipka has had multiple surgeries, a hip replacement and months of chemotherapy. After five months of remission, the cancer is back for the third time, and Sipka needs to go to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for treatments and surgery.
There is a fundraiser page titled “save sipka” at www.giveforward.com. At press time, 37 donations totaling $947 had been given. The total to be raised is $5,000.
For the yard sale Saturday, any and all donations are accepted, including furniture and small bags of household items.
For more information about the yard sale, call DeeAnne Adcox at 205-601-0124.
Sipka, 17, found out Feb. 28 that he was free of osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. Pain in Sipka’s left knee began his freshman year. During his sophomore year, the pain got worse, and a “mini chain link fence design” appeared in black and purple on the knee, Sipka said in March. A full body MRI revealed a softball-size mass on Sipka’s hip, and a surgeon determined it to be a bone cyst.
That diagnosis changed about a week later to osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer that Sipka said affects about 450 kids each year. It usually spreads up the leg, but Sipka’s spread downward, which happens to only about 5 percent of those affected, he said.
Sipka’s first chemotherapy treatment was Oct. 31, 2011, and he had a surgery in January 2012 to replace his hip bone and femur. He then completed chemo treatments until August 2012. He was told he was free of cancer, but his six-week scan revealed the cancer was back in the same spot. Sipka again had surgery, that time to replace a joint.
Contact Gary Lloyd at news@trussvilletribune.com and follow him on Twitter @GaryALloyd.