Kelly Chellis Is Our Champion Changemaker

By Julie Peck | March 24, 2025

Kelly Chellis had her first personal encounter with arthritis when her child, Trys, was 6 years old. As Kelly describes it, the week of Trys’s sixth birthday, they just woke up one morning with a swollen knee the size of a softball. No injury, no accidents — just a ton of swelling, and by the next morning, it had worsened. Born with a congenital heart defect, Trys has always been a fighter and asserted at the time that their knee didn’t hurt and they could go on to school. But Kelly’s instincts told her otherwise, so they went to the pediatrician and eventually to the children’s hospital.

There, Trys was placed on the infectious diseases floor: X-rays didn’t show anything unusual, and the assumption was that some kind of infection was in their knee. The diagnostic turning point came one day when Kelly and Trys were drawing together.

“Out of the blue, Trys wanted to draw a hand turkey. In March, that’s kind of odd to want to draw a turkey, but I’m like, great, I’ll trace your hand,” Kelly recalls. “When Trys laid their hand down on the table, their fingers would not actually lay flat. So that got rheumatology involved, and that’s when we heard the word ‘arthritis’ come out of the doctors’ mouths. I thought, ‘What? That can’t be. This is a 6-year-old child.’ I truly was one of those people who thought kids can’t get arthritis.”

Ironically, when Kelly was in college, she belonged to Alpha Omicron Pi fraternity, whose philanthropy is serving people living with arthritis though research, advocacy and other programs and resources. After Trys’ diagnosis with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), Kelly renewed her commitment in conjunction with the Arthritis Foundation.

“It was hard at times for me to figure out what to do (for Trys), so I threw myself into raising money and volunteering with the Foundation,” Kelly says. “At first it was mainly doing the Jingle Bell Run and the Walk to Cure Arthritis and talking to friends and raising awareness that kids get arthritis, too. That was one of my main goals.”

In 2019, the advocacy committee at the Arthritis Foundation invited Kelly and Trys to participate in Ohio’s Arthritis Advocacy Day at its statehouse, and they jumped right in.

“That was a day that definitely changed my outlook on what I could be doing within advocacy,” Kelly says. “Being able to tell our story and share our struggles with getting medications, the cost of the medications, the prior authorizations and all the hoops you have to jump through when you have a chronic disease — telling that story and being able to share it, it just really felt good that maybe change could happen. We left there feeling so good, like we were truly doing something that can make a difference, not just for Trys, but for everyone suffering with arthritis.”

Since then, Kelly has testified several times at the Ohio Legislature. She was one of the advocates who helped the Arthritis Foundation and its partners successfully get limits to “step therapy” — insurance requirements that a patient must try other drugs before they can receive the one their doctor knows will work.

There’s always more work to be done, Kelley says, but she always looks back on that first trip to the state legislature with pride. That day gave Trys confidence to pursue their path toward a career in pediatric medicine. Trys, now 22 years old, recently passed the Medical College Admission Test.

That day also brought the two of them closer together, as has Kelly’s own journey with osteoarthritis.

“All the things that Trys and I do with the Arthritis Foundation just bond us closer,” Kelly says. “I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis two and a half years ago. Waking up with that morning pain and thinking of my child going through that for so many years — it all really brings us closer. Working together on such a good cause also brings us closer and just gives us a lot of satisfaction.”