Level Up raises $3,500 for cancer research

Ryan Aguilar would take frequent walks with his father, Raul during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. It was a hobby the two shared while the rest of the world was also coping with social isolation, but those walks became painful for Ryan in November 2020 when at 16 he started to feel pain in his leg. An x-ray revealed a lesion on his right tibia, and he received a diagnosis of osteosarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer on Nov. 18. Aguilar started chemotherapy immediately after his diagnose and underwent three surgeries to reconstruct his leg and remove the tumor. 

Aguilar enjoyed a few rites of passage into adulthood. He graduated from Glen Cove High School in 2022 and was set to attend Nassau Community College to study computer game design, but instead of learning to drive, he was preparing for surgery and physical therapy to be able to walk again.  After the cancer spread to other parts of his body, Aguilar died in December of 2022, three months after his family’s home was heavily damaged in a fire. 

To help bring awareness to the devastating disease affecting families like the Aguilars, Nicole Helmus and Christopher Salka, co-owners of Level Up Glen Cove, a fitness and wellness center, hosted a morning with fun obstacle courses on Aug. 12. Although the company had it’s grand opening in May, they’ve made a big difference in the fight against cancer, raising $3,500 from the fundraiser, and they will continue to accept donations until Aug. 18 to the American Cancer Society.  

“We want it to be a fun event but for a great cause,” Helmus said. “We’re hoping that we can raise money to make a difference, but we’re also just hoping we can all come together, have fun, and maybe even empower somebody.”

Helmus has many personal connections with the disease, having friends and family who are a mixture of survivors and those who died from it. She knows that not many people diagnosed with cancer are as open as the Aguilar family have been, and hopes the event helped to rejuvenate a sense of agency and power that a diagnosis may have taken away from friends, family and those who were diagnosed. 

Cancer is the second most frequent cause of death in America, after cardiovascular disease. Cancer is the second-leading cause of death worldwide with about 10 million deaths per year. There are more than 200 types of cancer, which can be classified according to where they start in the body, such as breast cancer, or lung cancer. In the United States in 2020, 1,603,844 new cancer cases were reported and 602,347 people died of cancer. For every 100,000 people, 403 new cancer cases were reported and 144 of those affected died of cancer.

Aguilar advises that although a cancer diagnosis can be scary, the best course of action in treatment is to stay educated on the treatment plan. 

“The biggest thing is to remain positive, remain faithful, remain encouraged and be 100 percent involved in the process of what’s going on with your child or loved one,” Aguilar said. “We all don’t speak in doctor speak, and if we slow the doctors down, slow the medical team down and just ask those questions it’s a lot less scary and a lot more informative, because you can kind of expect what the next steps are.”