Brain surgeon with big heart gives free ops to cops
DAILY NEWS Monday, March 17th 2008,
As a professor of neurosurgery at NYU Medical Center, Dr. Patrick Kelly is known for his teaching skills and surgical innovations – at the moment, he is taking part in a national trial of a brain cancer vaccine.
But to dozens of New York City police officers like Detective Martin Marinez or Housing Bureau cop Antoine Reels, Kelly is a godsend.
Kelly, the Joseph Ransohoff Professor of Neurosurgery at NYU, operates on police officers free of charge.
Anyone who has had or knows anyone who has had major surgery knows that even the best insurance coverage is likely to leave the patient with a mountain of medical bills.
But for the hundreds of police officers he has helped over the years, that pile won’t include a bill from Kelly.
Marinez lives in Flushing and is back at work at Queens’ 107th Precinct after Kelly removed a benign tumor from his pituitary gland last September and again in December when it grew back.
“I went to another neurosurgeon first, but it turned out he dealt mostly with tumors of the spine,” said Marinez, 38. “That doctor told me there was a great doctor at NYU who does many surgeries and is topnotch. He gave me Dr. Kelly’s name, and I made an appointment.”
Reels, a Brooklyn resident, said he used to stuff his pockets with tablets of Aleve and Advil to fight off daily migraine headaches.
That ended on Nov. 28, 2007, when he had a seizure while driving and woke up in the hospital after crashing his truck.
A Long Island University Hospital doctor told Reels about Kelly, and his mother, Rosalind Lowry, a nurse working in Florida, also told her son of Kelly’s national reputation.
“She spoke to him with me,” said Reels, a married father of two.
“When she was comfortable with him, I was comfortable.”
Kelly, 66, did pioneer work in stereotactic surgery, a minimally invasive procedure that makes use of a three-dimensional coordinates system of images to locate the targeted tumor inside the brain. He also invented a nonsurgical way to map the size of a brain tumor based on the navigational system he uses on his boat.
He said his altruism is based in part on personal history.
Kelly grew up in upstate Lackawanna, the son of abusive, alcoholic parents.
“We [he has two brothers and a sister] grew up on welfare,” Kelly said. “When my parents would have these knockdown, dragout fights, I was afraid one would kill the other so I would always call the police. The police would show up at 3 in the morning to break up the fight, but they were always such gentlemen.”
Even after he and his siblings were removed from the home – Kelly spent much of his teen years in an upstate orphanage run by Polish nuns – he continued to appreciate how officers had treated him and his family, he said. Joining the Marines and serving from 1968 to 1969 in Danang during the Vietnam War reinforced his admiration for men in uniform, Kelly said.
He started waiving his fee for police officers when he saw insurance was not picking up much of the cost.
“He was just great,” Marinez said of Kelly. “He took care of me and my family. He kept us informed about what was happening with my case. I know he had a tough schedule, but he performed both surgeries on me, and I am very happy about that.”
“It really meant a lot to me and my wife what he did,” Marinez added.
“It’s a big blow when you come up with a tumor at the base of your brain. To have someone like him take care of me, that’s very big.”
Reels, who will see Kelly this week prior to asking to return to duty, agreed. “If not for him, God only knows what position I would be in.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/03/17/2008-03-17_brain_surgeon_with_big_heart_gives_free_.html
