YOUR STORY MATTERS HERE: Jill Kelley

By Tim Wesley

As a critical care nurse in the cardio-thoracic intensive care unit at Shadyside Hospital, Jill Kelley never fancied herself a wedding planner.

Except once.

“We had a patient who just had open-heart surgery and he wasn’t going to be out of the hospital in time for his daughter’s wedding,” Jill says. “So, we arranged for her to be married in the ICU. We had the pastor and bridal party come in. We put the patient’s vest on top of his hospital gown, and his daughter stood next to his bedside. He just really wanted to be at her wedding, so that was a very special time.”

The patient was discharged later from the hospital, providing the ultimate wedding gift.

Although not all of Jill’s nursing stories come with a happy ending, her Biblical (read: eternal) perspective often provides comfort to her, to her patients, and to their families. On one such occasion, Jill remembers a patient who suffered a stroke during a high-risk surgery and never made it out of the hospital.

“I was able to spend a lot of time with him and his family,” she says. “They had a very strong faith and there was a lot of praying, and they always included me. It was just a special experience because even though he passed away, he knew where he was going.”

Jill knows where the foundations of her own faith were forged. A native of Kingston, PA, she moved to Cranberry Township at age nine and began attending Dutilh with her parents, Malen and Wilma Bornais, in 1973. Now celebrating her golden anniversary at the church, she can recite a “Who’s Who” list of past and present members. 

Clyde and Sherry Cameron sat in front of Jill’s family in those early days. Sarah Hogue and her mother, Jean Nichols, sat nearby. Liz and Jack Miller were youth group leaders. And at Vacation Bible School, Nancy Plenderleith asked the students to memorize the Bible verse John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

“Nancy was the only one who could get me to memorize a Bible verse,” says Jill, with a laugh.

Rev. John McLeister was the pastor, and Jill became best friends with his daughter Lisa. At first, their parents didn’t allow them to sit together in church, but by the time they were teenagers, they could be found side-by-side in the last pew.

“Sometimes we would get the hairy eyeball from Lisa’s mom, who sang in the choir because maybe we weren’t always paying full attention to the sermon,” Jill says. “After the service ended, we used to ring the bell that now sits in the rose garden, and sometimes her dad said we rang it a little bit too much. We had a lot of fun, and I have a lot of great memories of that small, white church.”

Back then, the youth group only had a few members, so Jill recalls serving as president one year, then secretary the next, then president again, and so on. Youth retreats were held at Olmstead Manor in McKean County.

“I always loved going to church because it was just something we did as a family,” she says. “Plus, my friends were there, and it became part of my life and where I grew up. When I was 15, during Dutilh’s first contemporary worship concert, I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior.”

After “growing up” at Dutilh and graduating from Seneca Valley High School, Jill enrolled in the Shadyside Hospital School of Nursing and became a registered nurse in 1984.  For the next 23 years, she worked in the ICU and relished the opportunity to provide care to critically ill patients.

“I’m an adrenaline junky,” she says. “I enjoyed taking care of patients and especially seeing really critically ill patients get better and move out of the ICU. And when that didn’t happen, I was then able to take care of patients and families dealing with the end of life. I found it to be a privilege to help them through that journey.”

On that journey and throughout her career, Jill has leaned into her faith, and her faith has taken care of her by providing strength, peace and comfort.

“My faith and relationship with Jesus are how I get through each day,” she says. “People who know me are aware that I am a Christian. Over the years while I was a bedside nurse, I was blessed to be able to pray with many patients and families, as well as fellow healthcare providers. I always asked first, because I would never want to make them feel uncomfortable, but I’ve never been told no when I asked.

“Sharing tears and prayers is just something I‘ve been very fortunate and blessed with, to share my faith with patients, families, and colleagues. Throughout my time in the ICU, there were occasions when patients’ families had left, and the time for them to pass was near. As a nurse, you do everything you can to ensure that patients are not alone when they die.

“The good and the bad about being a nurse is that after you care for them, you have to be ready for the next patient, the next operation, the next family. But if you have patients for a long time, you do get connected to them, and that’s OK.”

Jill’s long-time connection to Dutilh – which provides her with “love, a feeling of home, a welcome feeling when you walk through the doors” – has also been a source of strength as she strives to grow into the church’s stated mission to Love God, Love Others, Love to Serve.

“My goal is to live by example depicting that I am a child of God,” she says. “In one of his messages about the Sermon on the Mount, Pastor Tom [Parkinson] said we are to strive and work toward perfection, and I continue to be a work in progress.”

After spending more than two decades in the ICU, Jill began working toward the next step in her career. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2009 and a master’s degree in nursing education in 2012, both from Waynesburg University. She also spent a few years in the medical surgery ICU at North Hills Passavant Hospital before returning to UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside in 2015 as director of patient safety.

In her current role, she leads a team that reviews “adverse events that occur in the hospital. Our goal is to look at processes and practices to improve care and to help mitigate these events in the future. It could be falls, medication errors, even communications errors between families and the health care team.”

Jill doesn’t always enjoy the administrative aspects of the job and would prefer to be taking care of patients, but she still gets plenty of opportunities to nurture her family.

Walt, her husband of 33 years, and she live on a farm in Saxonburg. They have four adult children (Becky, Phillip, Adam, and Ryan) and four granddaughters (Jillian, Emersyn, Autumn, and Alaina). Walt is retired after a 45-year career in the heavy equipment industry, but he stays busy on their 18-acre farm, and he helps Phillip on his 102-acre farm.

“We have mules, goats, and bunnies on our farm,” Jill says. “It’s Walt’s retirement dream. One of our granddaughters is involved in 4-H, so she shows and helps to raise the goats. Walt is also really good at playing Barbies, and I’m good at crafts and baking. The grandkids are all close geographically, and we couldn’t be happier about that. It’s just very rewarding because they have so much love and we are still so cool to them. They think it’s a lot of fun to come to our house.”

Thanks to her family, Jill even had another opportunity to showcase her wedding planning skills when Ryan got married last month.

“I baked a lot of cookies for that wedding,” she says, with a laugh.

-Published July 12, 2023

Editor’s Note: Jill Kelley accepted a position as a nursing instructor at UPMC Shadyside Hospital School of Nursing in August 2023.

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If you or someone you know in the Dutilh family has an interesting story or profession, send us your ideas! We would love to help tell the story. Email: communications@dutilhumc.org.