By Jordan Miller
Sports Editor
CARROLLTON – Josh Beadnell is a Carrollton football coach, a CHS graduate, and a gym teacher at Carrollton elementary – but most importantly, a father of two, who is married to his high school sweetheart, Kylie.
Josh, a normally active and healthy 31-year-old, fell ill one day while up high on a ladder.
“I noticed when I was working up high, I was getting dizzy,” said Josh.
He and his wife grew concerned, so they headed to stat care. That’s where the doctor diagnosed the football coach with vertigo. After three weeks of treating the dizziness and other symptoms as vertigo, Josh woke up sick in the middle of the night on June 21. Extremely dizzy while throwing up profusely, Josh and Kylie rushed to the hospital.
Even the ER doctor said Josh’s symptoms did sound like vertigo but ordered a CT scan just to be clear.
“That’s when they noticed it,” Coach Beadnell said.
Scans showed Josh wasn’t suffering from vertigo; he was experiencing symptoms due to a tumor on his brain. They admitted him to the hospital the following morning.
A tumor on the brain isn’t what Josh and his wife expected to hear, but after taking in the news, the couple had to prepare for surgery to remove the tumor just two days later on June 24.
“We transferred him to University Hospital,” Kylie said. “Where it [tumor] was located, they wanted him to get transported to a Level 1 facility.”
The couple spent the next several days in the hospital, including their seventh wedding anniversary on June 29. They were discharged the following day.
The Beadnells then had to wait. They knew the tumor was cancerous, they just didn’t know how severe it was until they got that phone call. Josh was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma.
“Obviously glioblastoma is the worst type you can get and stage four is the fastest growing you can get, but the silver lining with his is they found it early,” Kylie Beadnell said. “It hadn’t spread throughout his entire brain. His surgeon was able to get 95% of it out.”
Josh will undergo chemo and radiation treatments for the next six months to a year to battle this disease. His doctors say he will do chemo treatments every day and they are even open to a few medical trials.
“We are hoping with chemo and radiation we can get rid of the rest of it,” Kylie said. “He’s never going to be able to say he doesn’t have it because there is always going to be microscopic amounts of it in there. There’s no cure for it. It’s more of maintaining it and keeping it from growing.”
Kylie says her husband has no option but to battle it, because she isn’t letting him go anywhere anytime soon.
“I told him he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere,” she said jokingly. “He doesn’t have an option with that.”
Josh says the outpouring of support from the Carrollton community, football team, his family and former West Liberty football teammates has been overwhelming.
“I couldn’t believe my college buddies reached out to buy shirts for the fundraisers,” he said.
“His football kids have been messaging him, too,” Kylie said. “You don’t realize how many people you meet in a day. To have all of the people messaging him and sending him cards, people putting together fundraisers, selling shirts and bracelets, it’s just so much, it’s more than we could have ever dreamed.”
Josh’s sister organized a GoFundMe account dedicated to offsetting treatment/travel expenses for the family. At the time of The Free Press Standard publishing, approximately $14,000 has been donated over four days. The link to the account can be found at: https://gf.me/u/yftva2.
“We’re 30 years old, we never ever would have thought of this,” the Beadnells said. “That’s the worst part of this whole thing, we never planned for any of this to happen. I never, ever would’ve thought of it. We’ve had cancer in the family, but never at this age.”
For now, the Beadnells will be driving back and forth to Cleveland every day for treatments. Kylie and Josh noted that the outpouring of support and donations from loved ones, football players that Josh has coached and even strangers, is amazing.
“That was the amazing part of the T-shirts, bracelets and GoFundMe, I can tell his doctors, ‘we’ll get him to Cleveland every day that he needs to go,’” Kylie said. “We won’t have to worry about running out of gas to take him there. It’s so helpful.”
Kylie says Loudon Motors Ford of Minerva even gave the couple a vehicle to use for their trips to and from Cleveland for treatments.
A long road is ahead for the young couple, but they are ready to do this together. Josh is happy to have his rock (aka his wife) by his side throughout this unprecedented journey.
“Something like this really makes you know how much you need a lady like her in your corner,” Josh Beadnell said.
“It’s been a lot, but I know he would be there for me,” Kylie said. “Our parents have helped with our kids, which has made it a little bit easier for me, but it’s a lot to process. I had a moment this morning, but I tend to always try and keep things positive.”
“She’s my knowledge,” Josh said. “We go to the hospital and she’s taking notes at the hospital, asking all the questions because half the time I don’t get it, she has to explain it to everybody for me. She is definitely my rock.”
With a six-year-old (Levi) and a one-and-a-half-year-old (Holden) at home, it’s hard to explain what is going on.
“We haven’t explained anything to them, all they know is that daddy had a bump taken off of his head,” Kylie said.
Battling cancer is tough, but battling it during a global pandemic such as COVID-19 makes it that much harder.
“Typically when you go through something like this, people can be there with you, but during all this he was in having brain surgery for five and a half hours and I had to sit by myself through it,” Kylie said. “I think I was on the phone with family through the start of it to the end of it.”
Beadnell has two boys of his own, but also has a whole team of boys he calls his own.
He says he’ll be at football games this season supporting his team, whether he’s on the field or sitting in the box, he says he won’t miss it.
“I already went to a football practice and sat in the stands to watch it,” Josh said. “I’ll definitely be at games if we have a season, I’m just hoping we do.”
Kylie says she didn’t realize how much Josh meant to the team until he became sick.
“They mean a lot to him and he means a lot to them,” she said. “It’s good for a small town like Carrollton to have something that they can be a part of and I’m just glad he gets to be a part of it.”
“We just want to say thank you to everyone who has donated,” the Beadnells said. “We have gotten so much support through all this. I don’t know where we would be without it.”
Josh and Kylie also want to thank their jobs for being understanding through this difficult time.
To order shirts as part of a fundraiser for the Beadnell family, you can call 330-324-7249.
