Sherrod won't return to USDA

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They met at a cancer camp. One had leukemia, the other non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Their futures were uncertain, fearful.

Fourteen years later, Kevin Skelly, 31, and the former Kelly Schwalen, 29, are not only healthy and hopeful, they are married.

Better yet, they have been parents for three weeks. Into their far more predictable world, they have welcomed a new son, Liam.

In a week set aside in metro Atlanta to promote cancer awareness, with the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta hosting its annual Care-a-thon on Thursday and Friday, the Skellys together have stared down a disease, in its various forms, that can be haunting and won't let go.

“Some people regret having cancer and some people wish they never had it,” Kelly Skelly said. “I always tell Kevin it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, because of the friends that I’ve made and the friends that I’ve lost to the disease. And I met him.”

Yet to get to Aug. 2, the day their son was born, the Skellys had to endure personal trials that eventually brought them together at Camp Sunshine, a summer facility designed for children undergoing or recovering from cancer treatment.

Catherine Skelly, Kevin’s mother, said the sum of her son’s and daughter-in-law’s experiences in coping with cancer as children has made them resilient.

“Who better to be together than these two people,” she said. “They know how to look at adversity and overcome it.”

Subhed

Kevin Skelly was just 4 when the trouble began. In September 1983, he repeatedly fell asleep on the soccer field during games. Taken by his parents to a doctor, he was diagnosed with dehydration and fatigue.

“All I know is I felt miserable,” Kevin Skelly said.

The uncanny sleeping bouts continued. Another doctor visit brought worse news.

“They did the blood work and said get him to a hospital,” Dick Skelly said.

Kevin Skelly’s parents learned their son had acute lymphocytic Leukemia, cancer that could attack his immune system.

“It was like they sucked the oxygen out of the room,” Catherine Skelly said.

She initially received the news alone, not long after her husband had left the hospital. A doctor apologized for the previous battery of tests failing to detect the cancer. A painful bone marrow aspiration test was required to pinpoint Kevin Skelly's condition.

The results showed Kevin Skelly's system had been producing leukemic cells for only 96 hours.

“If we had taken him to the doctor a week earlier they would’ve misdiagnosed it or missed it,”Catherine Skelly said.

Two years into the treatment, nurses at Scottish Rite Hospital encouraged the Skellys to send their son to Camp Sunshine.

“The camp was a great boost for him,” Dick Skelly said. “He’d had that tube in his chest for a while so he couldn’t do a lot of things.”

That included playing any contact sports or swimming. Catherine said her otherwise quiet child came out of his shell.

“At Camp Sunshine they let him do all the things that normal kids did,” she said.

Kevin’s treatment ended at age 8, and by age 13, he was in full remission. But even after treatment was done, Kevin Skelly continued to go.

“I went every summer until 1996 when a cute new girl came to camp,” he said.

Subhed

Cancer struck Kelly Skelly in October 1995 – her freshman year of high school.

She was doing neck rolls as part of a warm-up exercise at Lassiter High School band practice when she felt a lump in her neck.

“I came home from school and said, ‘Mom, I think something’s in my neck,” Kelly Skelly said.

They felt enlarged lymph nodes and went to the doctor, who initially diagnosed mononucleosis.

“Luckily, my parents pressed and said, ‘can we do blood work?’” she said.

Tests were inconclusive, but a biopsy revealed Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

For a young girl already concerned about fitting in or being different, Kelly Skelly said the diagnosis sent her fears into overdrive.

“When they found out at school, there were kids who were afraid they would catch it from me,” she said.

Kelly Skelly’s mother, Marla Schwalen said she was distraught.

“As a parent, you come along and say, why my child?” Schwalen said. “Give it to me, Lord.”

But she said she was determined not to let the news dampen her youngest daughter’s spirits.

“Initially she said, ‘why me, Mom?” Schwalen said. “I said, it’s not a question of why, it’s what do we do now?”

Schwalen’s mother battled colon cancer, and eventually died after treatment for a brain tumor.

“They were treating her with a chemical so strong, Mom finally said, ‘no more,’” Schwalen said. “So I think that when we learned that Kelly had cancer, my main concern was that we just get her thru that, lift her up and have the shoulder for her to lean on.”

She went into remission.

But a teenaged Kelly Skelly, who already knew she wanted to raise a family of her own, was stunned to hear that wish was unlikely because of her six-month regimen of vincristine, vinblastine and other chemotherapy drugs meant to kill the cancer cells.

“A nurse told me quite bluntly, ‘oh, you’re sterile,’” Kelly Skelly said.

Her family remained supportive, Marla Schwalen said.

“I wasn’t going to worry about children for the time,” she said. “And her older sister Heather told her, ‘Kelly, if you can’t have kids, I’ll carry your kids for you.’”

Summer camp and love

Kevin Skelly started attending Camp Sunshine in 1986, age 6 and still in treatment.

There he found a world where he wasn’t the only kid with cancer, wasn’t the only kid who’d lost his hair to chemotherapy, wasn’t alone.

“It was more than just a recreational outlet to get me out of the hospital bed,” he said. “It was a way to serve your cabin mates, some of who were worse off than you.”

By the time Kelly Skelly arrived in 1996, a then-self-described “big man on campus,” was more confident than he was the first day he arrived.

“I thought I ran the place,” he admitted.

Kelly, acknowledged some reticence to attending “cancer camp.”

“I didn’t want to be around a bunch of sick kids,” she said. “Actually, I felt guilty because I wasn’t as sick as everybody else. I never lost my hair. I only had treatment for six months.”

But after just four hours there, “I loved it,” Kelly Skelly said.

She found she had so much in common with a lot of the girls she met there, she said.

They first met on Kelly Skelly’s second night at camp.

“The first time I saw her we were in arts and crafts and I was like, ‘Whoa!’” Kevin Skelly said. “She was making some beautiful piece of art work out of string and feathers and beads. I’ve got to find a way to meet her.”

That night at an ice cream social, Kevin Skelly said he spotted Kelly Skelly in a circle of girls talking to one of his cabin mates near the camp flag pole.

He approached and shmarmed his way into the conversation.

“Who are these lovely ladies you are talking to?” he asked his friend, winning an introduction to Kelly. “The crush started from there.”

Kelly Skelly, then 15, said she was initially oblivious of Kevin, but his charms eventually won her over.

“I really wasn’t interested in meeting any boys,” she said. “I thought he was a counselor. But thought he was really attractive.

In the camp talent show, he dedicated an acoustic performance of Hootie and the Blowfish song “I Only Want to Be With You.”

“No one in life had ever done anything like that for me,” she said. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’”

The remainder of the week, they exchanged notes and talked to one another in front of their respective cabins.

“We got to know each other fairly well.”

And when Kevin Skelly had to leave early for a church choir trim, he made a grand production about saying good-bye.

“Then Friday, he came by the pool, and was like ‘come here,’ and he pulled me to the side and kissed me on the cheek,” Kelly Skelly said, nearly blushing as the recalled the moment.

She said “everyone” at the pool there and saw what he did.

“It was tunnel vision,” Kevin Skelly said. “I knew if I took my eyes off her I never would’ve done it.”

From then, they became an item.

They wrote letters and post cards that summer.

Then there were phone calls.

Parents or older siblings giving them rides to one another’s homes or for dates.

Junior and senior proms.

Kelly attending the funeral after Brendan Skelly, Kevin’s older brother died at age 22 of a lifelong heart condition.

And going to separate colleges – Kevin at Georgia State University, and Kelly at Kennesaw State.

“Then I got stupid, and we broke up,” Kevin Skelly said.

“We broke up for some immature reason,” Kelly Skelly said.

The split seemed to hurt their parents more.

“I didn’t quite understand, but I respected Kelly and probably just wasn’t the right time,” Marla Schwalen said.

Kevin’s parents were equally disappointed.

“He’s never going to find another Kelly,” Catherine Skelly said.

Camp Sunshine, where now they both were counselors-in-training, remained the common thread that kept them talking.

“It was awkward because we were still broken up and had all of the same friends,” Kevin said. “But we remained cordial.”

“We were in college, but we were still trying to figure out what we wanted,” Kelly said.

During their year apart, Kevin transferred to Kennesaw State.

Then the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001, forced them both to reassess what was important.

Kevin called Kelly in January 2002 on her 21st birthday.

“It was post-9/11 and you had a different perspective on things,” he said.

“We were being more grown-up,” she said.

Subhed

They dated seriously until 2005.

And each year they continued to take a week off from their respective jobs – Kevin as a fundraiser for WABE Public Radion and Georgia Public Broadcasting, and Kelly as an administrator for Church of the Apostles’ children’s ministry – to volunteer at Camp Sunshine.

Then, on a balmy June evening at Camp Sunshine, Kevin proposed to Kelly.

During a teen week dance featuring Banks and Shane, she was told one of her campers was at the infirmary.

As she walked to check on the camper, she passed through the same courtyard and the same flag pole where she’d met Kevin nine years earlier.

He was there, and he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him.

“I was so surprised,” Kelly said.

They returned to the dance, where Banks and Shane played “Brown-Eyed Girl,” a special song for the couple, as the two announced their engagement to the camp.

“We could tell by the looks on their faces that they were so happy together,” camp director Sally Hale recalled. “We were just so thrilled for them.”

They married the following May.

And this past December, they learned Kelly was pregnant, despite warnings that she might be infertile from her regimen of chemotherapy.

Dr. Lillian Meach, an endochrinologist who heads CHA’s cancer survivor program and was Kelly’s doctor when her treatment was done. She said the therapy for Hodkins patients can affect ovarian functions.

“The kind of therapy she received does put an individual at risk for infertility,” said Meacham.

And while their parents had resolved that children for them were out of the question, Kelly and Kevin always remained hopeful.

“We were told the only way we would know if we could have a child is if we tried,” Kelly Skelly said.

Meacham had also warned so many years ago that there was a chance if Kelly became pregnant, her child could be premature or very small.

“I was like, ‘uh-oh’ at first, but more happy than anything,” Kevin said.

But Liam was born more than 20 inches long, weighing nearly 9.8 pounds.

“I can’t believe how perfect he is,” Catherine Skelly said of her grandson, whose middle name is the same as her oldest, late son.

Meacham said although Liam was born to two cancer survivors, his odds of contracting some form of cancer are no different from any other child.

“I’m so happy for her,” Meacham said of her former patient.

Kelly and Kevin are happy, too.

“We really feel like Liam is a miracle,” Kelly Skelly said. “Because I was on all the drugs they tell you scorch your female parts.”

Despite the couple’s beliefs, Kelly’s mother believes they benefited from cancer.

“Cancer did bring them together,” Marla Schwalen said.

And that, Kelly and Kevin Skelly do have an affinity for the disease they both were able to beat.

“Even if I hadn't beaten the disease, I think I’d still have the same feeling about it,” Kelly said. “We wouldn’t be here without it.”