By TOM DORSEY
The Courier-Journal
Louisville, Kentucky

WDJX's Todd Kelly recently passed an important milestone.

"I just started my third year with ALS," he said in an interview last weekend. About half the people diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis only live 18 months.

Kelly was informed he might have three to five years to live when first diagnosed, but he's still going strong and was at Hurricane Bay last weekend raising research funds for his foundation to find a cure for the killer disease.

He was just 29 when he was told he had the ailment, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Gehrig was the famous New York Yankees baseball player who died of it in 1941.

There have been changes in Kelly's condition since he first spoke with The Courier-Journal about his condition a year and a half ago.

"My ALS ... has robbed me and left little strength in my right and left arm," he told friends in a recent newsletter.

"They have officially put me on a cane full time and boosted my therapy, which I now do every day," he told me.

"I'm beating the odds so far because I do everything they ask me and more. Nobody can believe that I won't slow down," said Kelly, who is the promotion director at DJX and does the on-air shifts Saturday from 6 to 10 a.m. and Sunday from 7 a.m. to noon.

He wasn't always so upbeat.

"At the beginning, I was really devastated. I didn't care. I was so mad and hurt. I just didn't understand why this was happening to me," Kelly recalled.

Then he met Patrick LeRoy, who was 7 at the time and suffering from muscular dystrophy. Patrick told him to hang in there and not give up or give in to the disease.

"I was also hanging with Mattie Stepanek, a little kid who was my MDA brother who gave me inspiration to keep fighting ... that there was hope. They turned me around, and that's why I started my foundation," Kelly said.

Still, there are good days and bad days.

"Last Tuesday was really a bad one," Kelly said. "I found out that Mattie had passed away, and I thought we're just not going to beat it." But then he remembered what the boy had said to him.

"He would always say at the end of his e-mails to tell people that the money they sent in gives us hope to fund research to find a cure, if not in our lifetime, then for the next person, so they won't have to suffer what we went through."

Kelly is relentless in his drive to raise funds. A series of events and walks has brought in nearly $100,000. He hopes to get enough money to bring ALS research back to the University of Louisville, where it was once done until the money ran out. His other goal is to persuade all the radio stations in town to devote just one day to raising funds for that cause.

He has no intention of giving in, giving up or letting the ALS dragon get beyond the gates.

"I just can't slow down," Kelly explained. "I feel like if I stop, I'm going to let this disease beat me, and I want to beat it. If I don't, I want to leave a legacy for people to know they can keep on going and do what I did."