A Stratford couple tied the knot at an impromptu wedding at Connecticut Children’s on Saturday just days after getting some upsetting news. After dating for seven years, 26-year-old Jonathan Sales, a 7th-grade science teacher at Oakville’s Swift Middle School, took his girlfriend, 27-year-old Alyssa Griffin, out to a nervous breakfast and then went home and popped the question. And of course, Griffin, said “yes.”
The couple planned to have a wedding in May 2020 but their plan changed on Nov. 19 after Sales was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in his life. When he was just 13, he was successfully treated for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. Now, 13 years later, he’s been diagnosed with B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
Sales didn’t want to let his diagnosis stop him from marrying the love of his life, so the couple decided to push up the wedding. “I was looking at that May 30th date and I’m like, ‘Well, I could be great by then, I could be cured, I could be feeling good, but what do I actually really care about?” Sales told News 8 hours before the wedding. “That’s getting married to Alyssa.”
The couple said they’d just get married in a hospital hallway, but that simple ceremony wouldn’t suffice for hospital staff. They wanted the couple to have more.
“I’m not trying to be pessimistic, I am 100% going to be fighting this disease. I am 100% going to be giving it my all, but stuff happens and I might be too tired to participate in my $30,000 wedding in May.” “Anybody getting married gets lost sometimes as to the purpose of a wedding,” said Griffin. “You get stuck on, ‘What if the napkins don’t match?’ when the point of the day is to get married. The only real important piece is that when I’m walking down the aisle, Jonathan is the one at the end.”
Connecticut Children’s was able to plan the wedding with 10 days and was the hospital’s first-ever wedding!
From our partners at WTNH and WFSB.