IRL team rallies around crewman

September 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

Carey Hall’s mind remains as sharp as ever, so he knows the outlook is grim.

The muscles in his tongue are failing him, and he can’t express his thoughts as clearly as he could before his diagnosis nearly eight months ago. His hand muscles are deteriorating, too, meaning his days working as the refueling specialist for Sarah Fisher’s IndyCar pit crew are coming to an end.

Hall has ALS, a destructive disease without a cure.

There aren’t even that many doctor visits, because there’s just not much they can do to slow the disease’s deadly advance. And there certainly aren’t any easy answers; what do you tell an 11-year-old boy who says he doesn’t want Christmas to come this year because his dad probably won’t be able to speak to him by then?

“I remember the doctor saying to hope I had cancer,” Hall says through slurred speech, a common symptom of the disease. “We know so much more about that. Seventy years after Lou Gehrig had it, no medication, no treatment.”

The one thing Hall has is plenty of support.

Last Saturday’s race at Chicagoland Speedway may end up being Hall’s final race as a member of the pit crew. So Fisher, the team’s driver and team owner, decided to surprise Hall by putting the logo for the family’s ALS awareness website, careyshope.com, on her race car.

“We’re a family, and we support our people 100 percent,” Fisher said. “This is something really little in the big picture, but I’m hoping that by doing this, that our fans will go to careyshope.com and support us.”

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — often called Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the baseball star who is believed to have died of it in 1941 — causes degeneration of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, leading to poor muscle control and even paralysis.

According to the ALS Association website, half of all people affected with ALS live at least three or more years after diagnosis, 20 percent live five years or more and up to 10 percent live more than ten years.

“It’s destructive,” says Hall’s wife, Carla. “You try to be hopeful, but you’re somewhat hopeless. There’s nothing out there. And you live each day absolutely second to second. Scary.”

The 40-year-old Hall began having muscle problems near the end of last year. He spent most of New Year’s Eve in the hospital for tests, then was diagnosed with ALS a few days later.