Bill Kelly: Surviving and Thriving in Difficult Times

I had worked for, as you can tell, I had worked with the company for about 16 years and literally just turned 40 in April. And on July 26th at 7:30, I was at the Braves game, which I went to again last night and they lost, but hopefully they'll win and get the win back. I was at the Braves game, and literally I was at the game as I'm sitting here talking to you, and I had a Coke or beer in one hand, hot dog in the other, walking down the breezeway. And if you've ever stepped into a hole or pulled a hamstring, you know how it feels when your leg gives away. That's what happened to me. I completely hit the ground and I could not get up. And I had not known it, but I had a stroke. And they put me in a wheelchair, put me in the car, started to go home, but we ended up going to the hospital. Got to the hospital, and in the emergency room the doctor came in and closed the door and asked me if it was just me and my wife. And when he did that, I knew there was more to it. He said, 'You've had a stroke, okay, but I wouldn't worry about that because you've got a week to live. You're ate up with leukemia. Your white blood cell count's through the roof.' So that night they rushed me from North Fulton Hospital down to Northside Hospital in an ambulance about 11 or 12 o'clock at night, and it started chemo the next morning. And during chemo, I started having real bad brain issues. My head was hurting real bad. They did a CAT scan on me, and they came into the room and the gentleman told me at that point, he said, 'I wouldn't worry about the leukemia or the stroke right now. You've got a brain bleed or an aneurysm down your back, and you've got about 45 minutes to get into the operating room. We've paged the surgeon to get over here from across the street.' And unfortunately, he was able to come over and do brain surgery on me within half an hour. And after the brain surgery, I was in a coma for about seven to eight days. Came out of it, and when I woke up from the coma, they did not know what would happen to me. At first they didn't even know if I'd ever make it through the surgery. From all that I've been through, I had to go through while doing chemo, I had to have brain surgery. So that's something they had never attempted before with a patient going through chemo, to actually have chemo run through your body while you're doing brain surgery. But I made it. And the docs, when I came to, if you've ever been in a doctor's office and they do the needle on the bottom of your foot to see if you've got feeling, when I was laying there in the hospital bed they had me strapped down and the guy etched my foot with a needle and he said, 'Can you feel that?' And I was like, I couldn't move my head, I just said, 'Uh.' And he poked it with a needle, he said, 'Can you feel that?' I said, 'No.' And then he asked me, he said, 'Well, pick up your left arm or your right arm and do this for me with your fingers, Mr. Kelly.' And I couldn't pick up my arm, so the nurse picked it up for me. He said, 'Can you do this?' I couldn't. He said, 'Just move your finger.' And I still couldn't. I was paralyzed from the neck down. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even talk. All I could do was move my mouth, and that was it. And I laid there for three days like that, unable to do anything at all. And after the third day, my index finger finally moved about half an inch, just barely budged. And that's when I started out with just tears. I felt so sorry for myself when it all came down on me. But that little bit of spark in my little finger ignited, I guess, hope to keep going. It started out one finger, then eventually two, and it got to where I could finally start moving my fingers. It's kind of like a computer rebuilding. When you shut it down, all my nerve endings inside my brain slowly but surely started connecting once again. I was in the hospital for about three months, and I came home in a wheelchair unable to walk. And one of the proudest things I've ever been told was, I get emotional sometimes when I'm talking, so y'all have to excuse me. One of my kids had told me, he said, 'Dad, because the one thing I love about you is you're a survivor. You get through things.' I said, 'Well, thank you, son.' He goes, 'Because I always remember you being at my soccer games in the wheelchair.' I was in the wheelchair. Laura's husband brought home to my house a hospital bed for me to lay in at home that I could get in and out of, or be pulled out of basically. Started out with two people helping me learn how to walk after I went through speech therapy to learn how to talk again. And then I finally got into the granny walkers to walk with. It took me probably another month and a half or two months to get accommodated to that, to wear it out basically. Then I went to a four-post cane, then a two-post cane, and finally was able to start walking again. And as the years have gone by, I had to go through psychological testing, driving. I had to basically be reborn again, had to get my driver's license again. And I did not know how in the world I could ever get back into society to make a living. So I challenged myself and actually started studying online on the computer real estate and got my real estate license because I had a doctor that told me that I wasn't psychologically fit to be in society, to be at work again. And once I got my license, I proved him wrong. So I got my real estate license, started practicing real estate. And lo and behold, that was about three or four years ago when everything tanked on us. So once real estate went south, I went back to what I was born to do, but what my pride and joy in life is, is to be in the jewelry business. But the jewelry business had actually tanked as well. The only thing that had been going on for the last three or four years is people buying and flipping gold, you might say. So I got into a combination of carrying jewelry and also setting up shop and having about six different gold shows a month or a weekend in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, and had about eight employees and did real well with it for about two and a half, three years really. And just recently have quit doing that and gotten back into traveling once again on the road, hitting everything. But the point of everything is just the fact that I've never given up. And even now, one of the things that I'll back up for a second. With the leukemia, it stayed away for a year. I mean, I was about to say even now things are easy for me, but they're not. Because after a year, the leukemia came back. And they had to put me into chemo treatment once again to depress it, and they gave me a stem cell transplant. And the transplant, if you're familiar with it, anybody know anything about transplants at all? A little bit about it? They completely bring your body down, all your blood counts down to zero, so your immune system is non-existent and you can die from a cold practically. They knocked me down to zero, put in a donor's stem cells into my body. And when they injected it, it was like 90 Sam and 10 Bill, which is me. And after about three or four months, it was 80-20, then 60-40, and it was Bill coming back. So they told me that I had about six more months and then my immune system would be back again, and six months after that leukemia would be back in. So they gave me the option to run the risk of having leukemia again and having to try to get into remission, or go ahead and do another stem cell transplant. So I had to do it again, another transplant. And that was in '04 when that happened, and that was my last transplant, and it ended up taking at that moment. But through everything that I've been through, I mean from the brain surgery, I have had seizures left and right. Take medication to stay alive. I was taking probably 36 different pills twice a day to keep going. I've narrowed that down now to probably three or four a day, which is nothing compared to what I've been through. And now that I've gotten this far in life and I'm back at making a living, I show up at the doctor because I literally now never know what's around the corner. I walk in three weeks ago and my iron level should be around a count of a hundred. It's at seven thousand. My doctor's like, he goes, 'I don't know what keeps you alive. At seven thousand, you should have a stroke or something should go wrong, liver failure.' So they've been trying to get my iron level down through what's called a phlebotomy process. And during the phlebotomy process, if anybody knows anything about a CBC report, your blood counts, there's something called a hemoglobin, you get hematocrits, hemoglobins, white cells, red cells. Well, my hematocrit level was dropping way, way, way down, which means hematocrit's your oxygen in your blood. So they're trying to get the iron out of my system, and while doing that, all the oxygen is coming out of my red cells by doing so. So even now they're trying to balance the iron and the red blood cells so I can stay alive. So even as I stand here, I don't know what could happen to me as I walk out the door, just as I did that night at the Braves game. It just turned so quick. And I wonder if God has a plan for me, which I think he has. I try to share my story with everybody. When I was going through leukemia, my father ended up passing from melanoma cancer. My wife got breast cancer. I had to be the caregiver for her. And her dad passed away from lung cancer. So it's been something that I've always dealt with. And if you think times are tough, all you got to do is look up the street at somebody what they're going through. No matter how hard you got it, it's always somebody else's got it tough. I mean, I thought I had it tough, but I wasn't in the hospital and across on the other wing was the burn unit. Anybody ever felt sorry for me, I would tell them to go over there and see those people, because those are the people that I felt for. It wasn't me that was in pain. But if you guys ever need any help with anything, my company I started is called Miracle Diamonds, that I own now. They'll pass that around. But I'm just in the jewelry business. It's my passion, always will be. And whether it's for cancer-related questions or jewelry issues, anything like that whatsoever, if you guys ever have any questions or anything that I can help you out with, I'd be more than happy to chat with you about it, whether it's your loved ones. I'm a member of a support group nationwide that I get a call about probably once a week that I help somebody throughout the country that's battling cancer. Either me or my wife, because we're both members of it. But we get a very rewarding and satisfying feeling to help somebody else out. And that's what life is about, not about you, but what you can do for somebody else.