In fact, when his friend Tony asked him if he knew he had ALS before the diagnosis, Scott laughed, and said, yes, but he was hoping it was Parkinson's. Tony, who had also received an ALS diagnosis, laughed even harder, and said, "Parkinson's? I was hoping it was just gas."
At the time of his diagnosis, Scott had just lost his beautiful wife, Jennifer, to a particularly nasty battle with colon cancer. He had a daughter to raise and a business to run. To say that the diagnosis was poor timing was an understatement. He knew that things were about to get incrementally worse, so he called his brother and started assembling his team. Well, first he panicked and headed for Guadelajara. But after discovering that not even tequila could drown ALS, he returned home and got serious about assembling a team of ALS Doctors, got a counselor, an attorney, and reached out to people who would be a rock for him. The doctor who gave him his diagnosis told him he had 2-5 years, but Scott was determined to be an outlier.
As ALS progresses, it tries to lock a person inside their own body. But there is more than one way to live life, and Scott Craig started the Scott Craig foundation because he wanted to help other PLWALS find their keys. ALS is hard, dirty, ugly mess of a disease, but through his podcast, ALS Uncensored, his foundation and his digital artwork, Scott is dragging his ALS into the sunlight.
In Scott's podcast, ALS Uncensored, he shares about adventure, laughter, and service, while rolling and stumbling through the valley of the shadow of death. Sir Edmond HIllary once said, "It is not the mountains we conquor, but ourselves." As Scott shares, "ALS is a disease that destroys the neurons that controls the muscles of the body leaving many locked in with a sharp mind remaining in a broken body. We have to continue to adventure into a physical world not made for us. We have to laugh in the face of the absurdity of our predicament because there will never be enough tears. We must conquer ourselves."
Scott's hope in sharing his struggles, trials, and errors with ALS, is to help make things easier for others fighting the same battle. As Scott says at the end of every podcast, "Life is for the living... Besides, it's only a mild case of ALS."
