Some twenty years ago, local business owner, husband and father Scott Kelley led a colorful life of adventure and travel. He surfed, ran a half marathon, mountain biked, and white-water rafted in states and countries across the map.
His world began to collapse when a silent health issue crept in, leeching away Kelley’s energy, vitality, heat regulation and ability to even think clearly. His own wife described him as a “dead man running.”
Something had to change.
HOUSTON, Texas—Scott Kelley was a 24-year-old telephone system installer when an oil crash devastated the city. The economy plummeted, and job openings were scarce.
“Why don’t you move home and go back to school?” his mother asked.
So, Kelley moved back to his hometown of Nederland, TX and enrolled at Lamar University. With a bit of time to kill before his summer semester began, he drove down to the beach, where he’d heard that people were surfing at the pier.
“I got a board, and started surfing,” Kelley said. “I used to do one to two surfing trips a year… Florida, California, North Carolina, Hawaii, down the Texas coast and Louisiana. Eventually, I started going on out of the country surfing trips to Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.”
Kelley grew up in a small town and had a blue-collar family. When he reached adulthood, he had only traveled as far as one state over to Louisiana.
Surfing and exploring surf magazines dramatically opened up his world. Through interactions with other surfers, Kelley grew to realize the attainability of travel; he could scrape up some money, check out camping sites and carpool with friends. Thus began his life of adventure.
While surfing, a person becomes one with nature, he marveled. Dolphins leap out of the water near surfers and fish jump directly onto their boards. Through his trips, he’s seen sea turtles, sharks, a variety of jellyfish and waterspouts.
Surfing, more a lifestyle than a sport, also brought the young man in contact with land creatures like snakes and toucan birds. Further, his trips were colored by wild, unexpected encounters like dodging falling boulders and evading shootouts.
“In Mexico, [workers] were building a road at the top of this hill, with bulldozers. [In the U.S.], they rope things off, but they don’t always do that in other countries. So, they were bulldozing at the top of the hill. We heard a noise and looked up,” Kelley detailed.
“They had dislodged some boulders. All these big rocks were coming down the hill toward us with the force to knock down trees! My friends and I took off in different directions. It was kind of scary, but we were fine.”
In a separate surfing trip to Mexico, Kelley was with a group of Californians on a remote stretch of coastal highway when a group of men jumped onto the roadway with their guns cocked toward their vehicle.
“We were in an old station wagon, with a guy from New Zealand driving. We were trying to pass a truck driving slowly on a windy road. Finally, it pulled up so that we could pass. We went around, and then the guys jumped onto the roadway,” he explained.
“We’d heard a rumor about those guys… if [we] didn’t stop, they would shoot us. We kept it floored, and we all ducked down. If they shot at us, we don’t know it. They didn’t hit us, and we didn’t find any bullet holes in the car.”
Aside from surfing, Kelley enjoyed a highly active lifestyle and participated in other sports like racing mountain bikes and road cycling. He completed the MS 150 Bike Tour seven times.
When his wife was five months pregnant with the couple’s first child, Kelley took her to Costa Rica to attempt an adventure neither partner had tried before: rappelling down waterfalls.
“We rented a car, drove to a volcano, and we did white water rafting and rappelling down waterfalls,” Kelley described. “Of course, I told the guide that my wife was pregnant and confirmed it wasn’t anything overly rough!”
Yet underneath the surface, Kelley’s health began to slip away due to a silent, detrimental force.
His first symptom was an incessant feeling of coldness.
On surfing trips to the Gulf of Mexico, one of the warmest bodies of water in the world, Kelley had memorized at what water temperatures he needed a vest, a spring suit, a full suit or a full suit and booties.
His extreme cold intolerance became noticeable when this formula no longer worked for him. He began feeling colder in higher temperatures, and he struggled to continue surfing in the winter.
At work, Kelley had a heater under his desk. When he would go to the men’s room, he would turn the water on as hot as possible and run it over his freezing hands for as long as he could stand it.
“I would go to a meeting, and when I got back to my car, in the Houston summertime, I wouldn’t turn on my AC. I would sit in my car in the 160-degree heat and just think, ‘This feels so good,’” Kelley recalled with a shudder.
Simultaneously, Kelley began to experience severe fatigue at all times, independent of the quality of his sleep. On weekends, he would take three-hour naps, and upon awakening, he would still feel exhausted.
He also suffered from heavy brain fog. Minutes after having a discussion with his wife, he struggled to recall what the conversation was about.
Believing he had a sleep issue, he enrolled in a sleep study at a hospital. He was covered from head to toe in probes and monitored by doctors on camera while he slept.
“They made it look like a hotel room, and they recorded me sleeping. Afterward, the doctor said, ‘One thing I can tell you, you’re tired. It takes most people at least twenty minutes to fall asleep,’” Kelley quoted.
“‘You’re in a strange room with probes all over you. It took you two minutes.’”
However, Kelley’s sleep quality was good. The doctor wanted to test him for narcolepsy, but Kelley knew he didn’t have that condition.
One day, Kelley hit a stroke of luck when he heard a commercial by Dr. Hotze on the radio of Hotze Health & Wellness about hypothyroidism.
“One symptom of low thyroid is low body temperature and cold intolerance,” Dr. Hotze said, ringing bells within Kelley’s mind.
Some two weeks later, Kelley’s oldest daughter was sick. After he checked her temperature, he checked his own—for the first time, he estimated, since junior high or high school.
His temperature was a freezing 96.5 degrees.
“No wonder I’m cold,” he thought. He told his wife, and she said, “Go.”
So, Kelley scheduled an appointment at Hotze Health & Wellness Center in the month of early October, which in Houston still boasts fairly warm weather.
He met with a former doctor on staff, who grabbed his hands and remarked, “Your hands are ice cold! It’s 72 degrees here. Your hands shouldn’t be cold.”
Officially diagnosed with hypothyroidism, Kelley began treatment.
“That weekend, I was running a half-marathon. I was exhausted, and I’d never run a half-marathon,” he said. “I was running six miles a day, and on weekends I’d run nine to ten miles.”
“At the half-marathon, my wife said, ‘Today, I saw a dead man run a half marathon.’ I looked that horrible.”
Scott Kelley (left) with world-renowned Holistic Doctor Steven Hotze at Hotze Health & Wellness
Kelley kept going back to Hotze Health & Wellness to gradually increase his thyroid levels. After a bit of time and consistent treatment, his vitality returned, and he began to feel alive again.
Today, around thirteen years later, Kelley has a new lease on life. His brain fog has dissipated, and three-hour naps are a thing of the past.
“It’s rare that I take a nap now, but if I do, a long one is twenty to thirty minutes long,” he said. “I still have some cold intolerance, and my body temperature didn’t go back to normal completely, but if I hadn’t done this, I think I’d be dead or in a nursing home.”
Now, Kelley maintains regular check-ups at Hotze Health & Wellness and stays active with his family.
“I have a wonderful wife. We married in 2001, and we have two awesome daughters who are 18 and 20,” Kelley smiled. “They’ll both be starting at Texas State in the fall! It’s a new chapter for us.”
Scott Kelley is the president of TeamLogic IT located in the Energy Corridor, where business owners are offered IT services, including cybersecurity, backups, business continuity and day-to-day support. TeamLogic IT is a proud member of the Katy Christian Chamber of Commerce.
