From SceneDaily.com - For the first time in nearly two months, Jimmy Elledge has a positive sentiment about how his wife, Kelley Earnhardt Elledge, is feeling...
Quoting this...
"It's been a long process with a lot of not really conclusion to things. It's like, 'Well, it's this,' or 'Well, it's that' and a lot of things. When you get the words 'cancer' in there and 'pancreas' and things like that, it gets very scary. I'm thankful that everything should be fine.
"Everything's well. She should be getting up today and getting mobile and going through the recovery process. It is going to be a little while on that - as far as, we've got to make sure she doesn't get pneumonia, blood clots or things like that. Everything has been great... Things appear to be benign tumors right now - all of that looks pretty good.
"She's a very important part of my life, for sure, and the kids and Dale's life, so we need her healthy, that's for sure. It had been going for a while with no real conclusion... It's scary. It's something that you can't prepare for.
"It was an unusual thing that happened and sparked the surgery to be more intense than it needed to be. It basically was a tumor that had gotten attached to a blood cell that had burst somehow and enlarged to a point that it was blocking a duct in her pancreas, causing the attacks [in her pancreas].
"He said he had never seen anything like that in his 10 years and hundreds of surgeries [the doctor] has done, which ended up being a good thing because of what they thought it was.
"Rick Hendrick has been a major, major player in this deal, making sure she had the right doctors ... I'm thankful for his support.
"Naturally, you would hope that we could have gotten through this and talked about it after it happened. But it was close. ... It's not a bad thing. That's part of this life when she has that last name and everybody knows who she is and him.
"You're in the spotlight, and that's part of it. But that's a good thing too. Fortunately because of who she is and the people she affects and the businesses and the things like that, we got the extra support that we needed to make sure that everything was going to be fine.
"When you stand back and you think about it and you go, 'Man, this possibly could be a situation where you could lose your wife,' you think about, 'What is the magnitude of that?'. It's like being selfish, it's been a major, major incident for me. But the thing that hurt me the most was thinking about what is she not going to get to fulfill in her life. Is she not going to get to see her kids go to prom or go to college or put makeup on them? It makes you really put things in perspective sometimes about why a COT won't turn - is that really a big deal?' It's not. The good thing is that everything turned out fine and everything is going to be wonderful.
"The kids are going to have their mom for a long, long time and they're going to be able to do all of the things they've been doing and enjoy all the fun they've had thus far. For me and Dale Jr., we get to be the fortunate ones that we have somebody there that keeps us in line."
... Elledge, who also is dealing with the death of his grandmother
Friday, arrived Saturday morning and helped do his job as crew chief
for Reed Sorenson during Nextel Cup final practice at Bristol Motor
Speedway.
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