HUDSON – Imagine you’re Monica Kelly.

Your husband has spent the last eight days in the intensive care unit at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center since suffering a massive stroke on March 8.

You get a phone call.

Your 26-year-old son, who has been trying to keep the family business afloat in his father’s absence, has been in a horrible car wreck.

He’s seriously injured.

He’s being rushed to a Boston hospital for emergency surgery.

He could lose his left leg.

He may die.

“They scared me when it was one in the ICU and one in surgery,” Monica Kelly admitted.

New Hampshire has not been a friendly place to the Kelly family since they relocated here last fall.

The Kellys moved to Hudson in October from Wilmington, Mass., to be
closer to the family business, Advanced Sheet Metal on Tolles Street in Hudson. Their son, Brandon, was living with a friend in Lowell, Mass.

March 8 was a typical day. It was a Thursday. Bob and Brandon Kelly had a small argument at work about the direction the company was going.

Brandon worked for his father at Advanced Sheet Metal, which Bob Kelly had founded 15 years ago with a business partner, Bill Walsh.

The spat over, Brandon spotted his father standing in the garage bay door, listlessly coiling a length of rope. It was taking forever. Brandon thought he was upset about their talk, so he apologized, but Bob Kelly didn’t react. Brandon moved to give him a hug, but instead Bob Kelly collapsed in his arms.

Brandon started screaming and crying and yelling for help. He dragged his father to his nearby truck with the idea of speeding to the nearest hospital. Monica stopped him and called 911.

Bob Kelly had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, a brain bleed. A blood vessel in his brain exploded, flooding a quarter of his brain, according to doctors.

A visiting neurosurgeon quickly spotted the problem and operated on Bob Kelly right away, opening his skull and stopping the bleeding in two places. A snowflake-shaped metal plate and screws now hold his head together.

He was still at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center ICU on March 16, when Brandon Kelly was rushed into the emergency room downstairs following his crash.

Brandon Kelly had been on his way from a job site in Waltham, Mass., to the Tolles Street shop that Friday afternoon. He doesn’t quite know what happened after that other than instead of driving north, he had smashed into a utility pole near Winnhaven Drive. The accident closed down about a half mile of the road and left nearly 1,400 Hudson residents without power.

It also opened a foot-long gash on the back of Brandon Kelly’s head, shattered his left elbow and all but amputated his left leg below the knee.

“The next thing I remember is staring at my leg and I was shot over to the passenger side,” he said.

He gave up on the leg then and there in the cab of the box truck. He knew he would lose it. He was right. Doctors later completed the amputation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he was rushed by ambulance after being stabilized at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center.

“I’m very lucky to be alive,” Brandon Kelly said.

For a while Monica Kelly was traipsing back and forth between Massachusetts General and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital about half a mile away. That’s where Bob Kelly was recuperating – learning how to walk and talk again. Brandon Kelly was sent there too once his pain was manageable enough. Doctors coordinated their release in mid-April, barely a month after Bob Kelly’s stroke and a few weeks after Brandon Kelly’s crash.

They both came home with less than they left with.

Bob Kelly is doing well, physically speaking. His vocabulary is what lags now. He knows what he wants to say, what he’s looking at, but the words won’t come. It’s something he works on constantly, though he doesn’t like Monica Kelly’s “homework” assignments.

He’s working part-time now, though, picking up some hours doing estimates at Superior Sheet Metal, a former competitor.

He’s just now starting to miss the business he founded more than a decade ago.

“Fifteen years. Gone,” Bob Kelly said. “Today for some reason it hit me. It’s a tough, tough, tough loss.”

Brandon came home minus a limb and a direction that had seemed so clear before the crash. He’s learning how to walk with a prosthetic, something easier to do since doctors were able to save his knee, but still difficult.

“It’s like learning to walk again,” he said.

He’s still on some painkillers, but has been able to stop taking some of the heavy-duty, highly-addictive ones.

“It’s a lot of nerve pain and phantom pain, feeling like I still have a foot,” he said.

Given the medical bills and the family business going under, it was a devastating blow when the family’s insurance company, Arbella Insurance, denied Brandon Kelly’s worker’ compensation claim, believing initially he was on his way to the hospital to visit his father instead of working and that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

He was also denied for social security disability, he said.

The state Department of Labor overturned the insurance company’s ruling. Brandon Kelly said doctors and witness reports showed he was awake for the crash and that it was caused by his attention deficit disorder. He was also on his way to Advanced Sheet Metal and was still working, not on the way to visit his father in the hospital, he said.

But now the family fears the insurance company will appeal the Department of Labor’s ruling. For now, Brandon Kelly said he can only thank the company for its “understanding, generosity, sympathy and protection.”

All three Kellys have lost the family business, which for Brandon was his future. Now he doesn’t know quite what to do. His work before was all on ladders, ceilings and roofs – something he can no longer do.

He’s teaching himself computer coding and programming and considering going back to school, maybe for engineering.

Monica is looking for work now. She did clerical work at Advanced Sheet Metal.

“We all worked in the family business so it hit hard. It was almost like the perfect storm,” Monica Kelly said. “We’re trying to get back on our feet.”

Monica Kelly said it seems like forever since her husband collapsed in a garage and hardly less than that when her son was nearly killed in a car crash. But when she thinks about the fact that not even half a year later both of them are at home and healing, it doesn’t seem like so long after all.

“It seems like a long time to me, but then I look back and see how much they’ve done and it has been a short time for a healing process,” she said.

Joseph G. Cote can be reached
at 594-6415 or jcote@nashua
telegraph.com. Also follow Cote
on Twitter (@Telegraph_JoeC).