Grammy nod cheers cancer-fighting pair

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Win or lose, Charlie Kelley has a lot to be thankful for when the Grammys are handed out on Feb. 8.

When Kelley’s duo The Boxhounds were nominated for best polka album in December, the 40-year-old musician was in the hospital recovering from colon cancer surgery — a trying end to a trying six months in which both he and his wife, cable TV’s Great American Country personality Nan Kelley, were diagnosed and treated for cancer.

“It’s been such a hard year,” he said recently. “Nan had kind of finished her thing and then we went straight into this. I didn’t have a chance to breathe. I didn’t have a chance to feel anything.”

Today, their cancer is in remission and they are working again. As they spoke in the living room of their Nashville home, they joked about their ordeal the way other couples might joke about a bad vacation.

“When we go to the oncologist, he says ‘Which one are we seeing today — you or you,” laughed Nan, who’d just appeared on air for the first time since her treatment without a wig covering her short dark hair.

Nan, 43, was the first to learn she had the disease after finding a knot in her neck last spring.

“I had no other problems,” she says. “I was certain it was a goiter [enlarged thyroid].”

But it turned out to be Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that is very treatable if caught early, as hers was.

“They said ’We know how to beat this one. The chemotherapy has been in place since the ’70s. We know how to beat it. You just have to get through it,”’ she said.