Cancer > A Phoenix Rising

A Phoenix Rising

When complications threatened her treatment progress, Kelli Bartol turned to Mayo Clinic experts for help — and found a new creative outlet for sharing her cancer journey.

By Rich Polikoff Photography by Paul Flessland

The Phoenix represents Kelli 2.0. Kelli 2.0 is not the Kelli Bartol of a few years ago. Kelli says that version was “a very my-way-or-the-highway person.”

Instead, Kelli 2.0 has been thoroughly transformed since her cancer diagnosis. She’s still facing health challenges, but she’s also living each day to the fullest.

“I’m just happy to be here and not that type A personality anymore,” says Kelli, who lives in Golden Valley, Minnesota. “Everything I went through changed me at a core level.”

She says there’s a good chance she might not be around today without her Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center care team, led by Patrick McGarrah, M.D. They’ve provided Kelli with expert treatment for more than three years, helping her reach some important milestones.

When Kelli was originally diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma in 2021, her goal was to live long enough to see her son, Aiden, graduate from high school. With Aiden currently in his second year of college, she has a new goal: watching Aiden’s college graduation.

Kelli credits her team at the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center with making it possible for her to attend her son Aiden’s high school graduation.

“I can honestly say I love Dr. McGarrah,” she says. “He has been my partner in crime in this and so supportive. And I’m so lucky to live near Mayo Clinic. I’m only an hour and a half away. Everybody on the team is always wonderful. I’ve never had a bad experience at Mayo.”

Kelli started chemotherapy after her diagnosis at a local provider. She tolerated it well, until the day her face suddenly began to turn purple.

Soon after, Kelli found herself waking up from a coma — one she had been in for over a week.

“It turned out that I had blood clots in my heart, my lungs, my neck and my leg,” she says. “They tried everything they could to get rid of them without going in surgically and nothing worked. They had to open up my chest, and while they did that I had a bad reaction to something, swelled up, and they put me in a medically induced coma.”

As she awoke, Kelli was informed by her doctors she had two potential courses for treatment. The wrong one, they said, would kill her.

At that point, she turned back to Mayo for guidance on a life-or-death decision.

“Mayo Clinic did all the blood work and said, ‘This is what we think your platelet issue is and this is the way we’re going to treat it,’” she says.

“The treatment worked. There were other obstacles — there were about five close calls with death along the way — but they finally got me out of rehab and into chemotherapy. They were able to shrink the tumor enough so that we could do surgery to remove about 20 lymph nodes.”

Kelli, who has always had a creative streak, knew she needed to have an outlet as she healed from her surgery. Her options were limited by the effects of her illness — she had virtually no mobility after waking from the coma. Even today neuropathy has limited the dexterity in her hands and feet.

She decided to go with watercolors. She had taken a class and painted some prior to the cancer diagnosis, but now the inherent nature of watercolors resonated deeply with her.

Kelli now channels her creativity into watercolor paintings, where she finds beauty in the imperfection.

“The beauty is in the imperfection,” she says. “I was such a perfectionist, and I needed something to help me let go. Watercolor doesn’t go perfectly. It’s liquid, it’s water. It goes where it wants to. Sometimes the color isn’t quite right, and you have to paint more or do it over.”

When Kelli completed her first work postsurgery, she gave it to Dr. McGarrah, who had become part of her care team during his oncology training and stayed with her as he transitioned onto faculty. The painting she gave him, shown above, is a watercolor of a phoenix that integrates images taken by pathologists of her tumors.

She transformed the tail feathers into peacock feathers, “so they have that big, bold, colorful part in the center,” and she replaced the centers of those peacock feathers with her cancer cells.

Kelli’s decision to incorporate her cancer in her art was made to represent how much her medical experience has changed her — from that demanding version of Kelli to Kelli 2.0, someone who knows she is diminished physically but feels she has become a better person.

“Kelli is an amazing woman and a very special patient for me personally,” Dr. McGarrah says. “She has been through almost unimaginable ups and downs, but always displays such grace, kindness and humor at each of our visits, whether the news is good or bad. It’s such a privilege to be a part of her cancer journey.”