I believe the popularity of those TV or movie medical dramas can be attributed to the fact  that the audience gets to live vicariously through some unlucky soul's horror of disease.  Living through someone else's medical condition is comforting because you're healthy.  But what if a serious health issue visits you personally and the nightmare of disease becomes your reality?  Dealing with disaster and living with it.  I've been there, done that and bought the tee-shirt.

Up until my diagnosis, it was always the other person who got cancer, went blind or was confined to a wheel chair. This is the story of my medical odyssey through the darkness.

I was born and raised in Los Angeles.  My mother and father and two older brothers migrated to Los Angeles from the mid-west in 1946 when the Cleveland Rams football team came to LA.  My father was a very popular sports broadcaster, Bob Kelley.  He was known as "the voice of the LA Rams" among other things.  Dad also had a sports program called, The Parade of Sports.  He announced the Angles Pacific Coast League baseball games, did small roles in movies and owned a restaurant.  He did a lot of things right up until the time of his death in 1966.  He was 49 years old.  He worked hard, played hard and died young.

I was born in 1950 and was 16 years old at the time of my father's passing.  My younger brother Mike was only 12. Two years after my dad died I decided to follow in his broadcasting footsteps. 

I won't bore you with the story of my success in the wonderful world of radio.  Suffice it to say, from San Luis Obispo through Palm Springs, Santa Barbara and Duarte, over a ten year period, I finally made it to KMET in Los Angeles.  In 1978, the "legend" of Paraquat Kelley was born.  Lord knows, I tried to do my father's name proud via the radio.  The only difference was, back in the day, he was dubbed "Southern California's most respected sports authority."  I jokingly referred to myself as: "Southern California's most least