Defying All Odds: Cancer Survivor Walking New Path

It's not often we get to see David Kelso's personality. It's mostly just his voice we hear as he's been a disc jockey in Oklahoma for 30 plus years. But last November, the DJ's time on this earth almost ended.

“I was sitting in my house, it was a Saturday,” remembered Kelso. “I was sitting in my chair playing a game on my phone and I started seeing weird tracers. It’s like they were still fighting in my eyeball and it made me feel nauseous and so I laid down and the very next second it was Sunday at 9:45 and they were trying to tie me down to a hospital bed and I was freaking out. I didn’t know where I was.”

That's when he got the diagnosis: Glioblastoma - an aggressive form of brain cancer. 

“You start staring at your own mortality, right? It gets really dark,” said Kelso.

Doctors at Stephenson Cancer Center at OU Medicine did surgery to remove the tumor and then started chemo and radiation right away.

“I remember laying on the floor of my bathroom begging God not to kill me, begging God to let me be a dad and a husband. Because that’s all I wanted to do in the whole world,” said Kelso.

“I tried to tell him it’s going to be fine. You’re not dying tomorrow,” said Dr. Sarah Sung with the Stephenson Cancer Center. “You’re not dying next week. We have treatments for this and we’re just going to get through it.”

Every time he went for one of those treatments the staff piped in just what this seasoned disc jockey needed a little classic rock.

“They played the grateful dead for me every time I went in. Thirty different treatments. That’s how you get through cancer, you just get through the next 10 minutes.”

Ten minutes turned into six months and that's when he finished up his last treatment and embraced his wife. The cancer was gone.

“Victor Frankl said this, Victor Frankl was a psychiatrist in the concentration camps. He said human beings can withstand almost any level of suffering if they think they can find meaning in it,” said Kelso.

And his meaning is to now inspire others and he's doing it one step at a time.

“We started walking and we’ve been walking ever since,” said Keslo.

Shortly after his diagnosis, he started Hike to Heal. Every other week a group gets together to hike a different spot in the state.

“And it’s turned into something because of all these wonderful people. I’m healthier than I’ve been ever.”

Admittedly, most of them joined his group just to support him.

“But what we found is we’re all kinda healing from something right?” said Kelso “We sometimes refer to this as the church of the tall trees. It’s made me look at things a different way. I never would have, and God we’ve gotten fitter.”

Who's getting the most out of the group is up for debate. 

“All these people saved my life. No question about it,” said Keslo.

What's not is David's message and that's to appreciate every second you have.

“I’m closer to my wife, my kids, my family, my friends, my God -- and all of that happened because of cancer. Do I have to be grateful I got cancer? I don’t think that really matters. I’ve just got to be happy I got all this good stuff out of it. I’m going to kiss my wife, hug my kids. I’m going to look at the big blue sky in Oklahoma, grateful to be alive.”

And he's especially grateful to Dr. Ian Dunn and Dr. Sarah Sung who got him through his treatments.

As for his future health outlook - he said that's not written in stone, but if the cancer comes back, he beat it once and he'll just have to do it again.