SCENEDAILY - 4:30PM ET SATURDAY MARCH 24, 2007 - BY BOB POCKRASS - ASSOCIATE EDITOR
BRISTOL, Tenn. - For the first time in nearly two months, Jimmy Elledge has a positive sentiment about how his wife, Kelley Earnhardt Elledge, is feeling.
Elledge says his wife is doing fine a day after a three-and-a-half-hour surgery Friday to remove a benign tumor that was resting against her pancreas. He said she was in a little bit of pain but already had the tubes taken out of her nose and stomach as of Saturday morning.
The surgery was the result of a culmination of tests Earnhardt Elledge had undergone since late January.
"It's been a long process with a lot of not really conclusion to things," Elledge said. "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.
"I can't tell you how your body deals with stress. You can't manage it, and you can't deal with it."
Earnhardt Elledge handles the business affairs for brother Dale Earnhardt Jr., and her health issues have put his contract talks with Dale Earnhardt Inc. on hold. She still has to go through the recovery process and will likely be in the hospital for five to seven days.
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.
"Everything's well," Elledge said. "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."
Earnhardt Elledge got really sick a couple of weeks ago, her husband said, and went through a battery of tests leading up to the surgery.
"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," Elledge said. "It had been going for a while with no real conclusion. ... It's scary. It's something that you can't prepare for."
She has not been feeling well since late January, Elledge said, and it was determined that she needed the surgery Wednesday. The surgery included looking at her spleen, gall bladder and pancreas and the final pathology tests will be known in a few days.
"It was an unusual thing that happened and sparked the surgery to be more intense than it needed to be," Elledge said. "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."
Elledge credited his doctors, including surgeon Dr. David Iannitti, for getting the surgery done quickly. He also said Rick Hendrick has been involved.
"Rick Hendrick has been a major, major player in this deal, making sure she had the right doctors ... I'm thankful for his support," Elledge said.
Earnhardt Elledge's health issue was relatively not widely known in the garage until Earnhardt Jr. mentioned that his contract negotiations were on hold Thursday until his sister got better. Her health then became the subject of many media reports.
"Naturally, you would hope that we could have gotten through this and talked about it after it happened," Elledge said. "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."
Elledge admits he was scared.
"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?'" Elledge said. "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?"
Elledge said the whole thing helped put life in perspective.
"It makes you really put things in perspective sometimes about why a COT won't turn - is that really a big deal?" Elledge said. "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."
