Two years ago, Smith was diagnosed with Stage 4 brain cancer. Since then, he has refereed more than 100 games.THORNTOWN, Ind. -- The five-inch scar is there on the right side of Scott's Smith's shaven head. And so are the tiny indentations all over his scalp from the pads and bandages he pulled off 20 minutes before the basketball game he is about to referee.
Smith is well past 12 to 18 months and well into a number, a prognosis, that no one wants to say out loud. For people with glioblastoma who make it past 18 months, 25% survive two years and only 5% of patients make it more than five years. Smith went through radiation and chemotherapy. He started wearing the machine to target the cells of the remaining 10% of the tumor. His most recent scans have come back NED: no evidence of disease.
"Scott is a force of nature. He is unstoppable," said Dr. Kulwin."I think surgery probably slowed him down as little as I've ever seen. There is a big psychological component to all of this.Smith was refereeing a basketball game in December of 2020 when he came into contact with COVID. He didn't know he had COVID; he didn't have any of the respiratory symptoms.
After driving from Crawfordsville, where they live, to Avon to eat at BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, Smith pulled into the parking lot. She started asking Smith questions, like what he had eaten for lunch that day."And it was just blank," Michelle said. She then asked Smith if he had gone anywhere that day. No, he told her. Michelle knew he had gone to the chiropractor. No, he told her again, he hadn't gone to the chiropractor.
"And we kept saying, 'Oh, we're OK because that's the last one on the list,'" Michelle said."You just kind of hold onto hope it's not really a brain tumor.""He dropped the bomb on us there and said, 'You have a brain tumor,'" said Smith."I said, 'Say that one more time.' And he said, 'You have a brain tumor.
"I always said when I played sports, 'If you think positive thoughts, you're going to get positive outcomes,'" Smith said."So with this, I was like, 'We're going to win the war. We're going to fight the battles and we're going to win the war.'" "You're counting those days really quickly and you're thinking, 'OK, this is the last Christmas, this is the last Thanksgiving, this is the last'..." she said."And it's hard. There is a lot of crying, a lot of praying, a lot of relying on each other."
Good luck Scott Smith.