I had just turned 17 when I met my husband, Kelly. We weren't looking for each other. Some people would say we happened to be in the right place at the right time. I say God had His hand in this chance encounter.
I was still in high school and, on this particular Thursday in November, I decided to go to lunch with two of my friends from school. We made our way to Taco Bell, ordered and had just sat down in our booth. In walked Kelly. I had no idea who he was but one of my friends recognized him from church. She motioned him over and he sat down at our booth next to me and we chatted awhile. Since he had just gotten off working an overnight shift he ordered his food and left.
I honestly didn't think much of it until Sunday afternoon. My friend reached out to me and told me she saw Kelly at church that morning and he wanted to meet me. I went to church with her that evening and her, another friend, Kelly and I hung out after church.
A little over a year later, I got engaged and we got married six months after our engagement. That was June 1987. Yes, we were very young when we got married. We did lots of things wrong. We didn't know how to adult. But we figured most things out and we did the best we knew to do. A year and four months into our marriage, our life would drastically change.
Kelly and I were visiting his brothers in California. We had been there a few days when Kelly started complaining that his legs were really sore. We had gone to an amusement park so we just figured it was from all the walking. The pain continued to get worse. We talked to my mother-in-law and she said maybe it was due to a change in the altitude or maybe he was low on potassium or magnesium. We continued our vacation. Kelly started having what we thought were migraine headaches. Sometimes the pain was so bad that it almost made Kelly pass out. We finished our vacation and flew home to Colorado. Both of us were going back to work the next day. We were preparing for the week when Kelly could not handle his pain any longer. I had to take him to the emergency room...
