Cancer brought Roswell couple together, led to a son

In a week set aside to promote cancer awareness throughout metro Atlanta, the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta will host its annual WSB Care-a-thon on Thursday and Friday. Cancer patients and survivors, including the Skellys, will join on-air personalities Clark Howard and Neal Boortz on 750 AM and 95.5 FM in an effort to raise funds for the hospital group's Aflac Cancer Center.

Kevin and Kelly Skelly, a Roswell couple three weeks into parenthood, together have stared down a disease, in its various forms, that can be devastating and relentless. However, it brought them together and has led to only good things.

“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," Kelly Skelly said. "And I met him.”

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

Catherine Skelly, Kevin Skelly's mother, said her son’s and daughter-in-law’s experiences in coping with cancer has made them a resilient pair.

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

Kevin Skelly was just 4 when the trouble began for him. 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.

However, a second opinion and a painful bone marrow aspiration test brought worse news: Kevin Skelly had acute lymphocytic leukemia, a type of cancer that attacked his immune system.

The results showed Kevin Skelly's system had been producing leukemic cells for only 96 hours, which helped explain the earlier diagnosis.

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

For the next three years, Kevin Skelly lived with a catheter in his chest to take his medicine and had monthly spinal shots to halt the spread of the deadly disease to his brain.

“That meant he’d wrap his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist, and he’d scream in my ear,” his father, Dick Skelly, said. “I’d want to cry, but I didn’t. It took a bite out of my heart.”

Two years into the treatment, nurses at Scottish Rite Hospital encouraged the Skellys to send their son to Camp Sunshine. Catherine Skelly said her otherwise quiet child came out of his shell in the recreational environment.

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

Cancer struck Kelly Skelly in October 1995, during her freshman year in high school. She felt enlarged lymph nodes and went to see a doctor, who initially diagnosed mononucleosis. Her parents pressed for blood tests. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma was revealed.

Marla Schwalen, Kelly Skelly’s mother, was distraught but determined to keep her youngest daughter positive.

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

Kelly Skelly went into remission after six months of chemotherapy. However, the teenager, counting on someday raising a family, was told that motherhood was unlikely because of the regimen of drugs she ingested to kill the cancer cells.

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

Kevin Kelly had been a fixture at Camp Sunshine for a decade by the time Kelly Schwalen arrived in 1996. They met on her second night at camp.

“The first time I saw her we were in arts and crafts and I was like, ‘Whoa!’” Kevin Skelly said. “I’ve got to find a way to meet her.”

Later at an ice cream social, Kevin Skelly spotted her in the camp courtyard with a group of girls and talking with one of his cabin mates. He worked his way into the conversation.

He was just as bold in the camp talent show, dedicating to her an acoustic performance of the Hootie and the Blowfish song, “I Only Want to Be With You.”

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

Leaving camp, he made his attentions known once more, kissing her on the cheek in front of a huge crowd of campers.

They wrote letters and postcards that summer. They dated until he graduated from Wheeler High School and attended Georgia State University. They broke up. A year after she graduated from Lassiter High School and enrolled at Kennesaw State University, they were Camp Sunshine counselors in training and rekindled their relationship. He proposed to her at the camp in 2005. They married the following May.

This past December, Kevin and Kelly Skelly, a WABE Public Radio and Georgia Public Broadcasting fundraiser and Church of Apostles children's ministry administrator, respectively, learned she was pregnant, amid warnings she might be infertile or have a small or premature baby. Liam Skelly, 9.8 pounds and 20 inches, was healthy on delivery.

Cancer scared them, but couldn't stop them. Their son is evidence of that.

“We really feel like Liam is a miracle,” Kelly Skelly said.

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Care-a-Thon

The 10th annual AM 750 and now 95.5FM News/Talk WSB Care-a-Thon benefiting the Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta will be Thursday and Friday. This 37-hour broadcast features stories of hope and inspiration from Aflac Cancer Center patients, families and staff. For more information or to donate, visit wsbradio.com.