Former Journey singer Steve Perry has opened up to fans on his Fan Asylum website for only the second time in 2013. In a lengthy and extremely touching blog post, he revealed that he fell in love with a woman who ended up succumbing to cancer, and that he himself suffered a recent cancer scare.
Perry wrote that he fell for psychologist and breast cancer survivor Kellie Nash after seeing her in a cancer TV special and deciding that he simply had to meet her. "In May of 2011, I was with Patty Jenkins in an editing room as she was putting the final editing touches on what was to be the closing segment of a Lifetime Channel breast cancer special called 'Five,'" he recalled. "As the opening scenes camera panned across an outside hospital patio, a narrator's voice commented on their lives and their types of cancer. The camera came across this girl sitting there laughing…I asked [Patty] if she would send Kellie an email that your friend Steve would love to take her to coffee or lunch sometime.
"Patty agreed to do so but said, 'Before I do that I think there's something I should tell you first. After a 3 year battle she was in remission for 8 months then it came back in her lungs and bones and now she's Stage 4 fighting for her life.'"
Perry was admittedly taken aback. "I was frozen……. I didn't know what to do…….. I had lost my mom, dad, grandparents that raised me and I was an only child so my first thought was to maybe not send the email; then my heart said, Maybe we could be friends or maybe she could be my shrink. So I said, 'Please send it.'"
Once the two met in person, it was love at first sight, and they ended up dating for a year and a half. "Yes, we both knew that we were meant to be together. My life was forever changed in ways I will explain at another time but it was all because of my Kellie," said Perry. Perry was by Nash's side as she battled cancer. Together, they relocated to New York, where Nash tried an alternative treatment and the couple "had the most magical summer of our lives together." But Nash's cancer came back, and sadly, she died in December 2012. Read more
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