FL Polio Survivor Raising Funds To Continue Work With Therapy Dogs

TRINITY, FL — Although William “Scott” Baggett hasn’t had an easy life, his primary focus remains giving back to the community, predominantly through his beloved therapy dogs that he takes to visit children in the hospital, or to read with children at schools, libraries, and other community events.

The 71-year-old Trinity man, who was raised in Tampa, faced early health issues as a preschooler, when polio left him paralyzed for several months, leading to his becoming wheelchair-bound later in life, he told Patch.

He also got caught up in his parents' bitter divorce as a teenager. By the end of his senior year in high school, his father, a U.S. Navy veteran and semi-pro baseball player, took his own life.

“My life has been a lot of struggles,” Baggett said. “But the hardest has been the polio.”

When he was 4 years old, he went to bed “a normal kid” and woke up paralyzed in both legs and both arms for 120 days, he said. He spent six months at Tampa General Hospital.

“My mother taught me to relearn to walk,” he said, adding that polio destroys muscle tissue and his bout with the disease affected his right shoulder, arm, and hand long term. “But that didn’t stop me from doing things. I just had to find how to do it my way. All my life, I was told, ‘You can’t do this, Scott; nope, you can’t do this.’”

But he persevered, determined to prove people wrong.

Golfing Aspirations

Not long after his father’s death, Baggett became interested in golf, first hitting 10 golf balls a day, working with his physical limitations. He was hitting 200 golf balls a day after a couple of years, and then, 300 a day.

“I was hoping to play professional golf. I had a 25 handicap that I drove down to an 8 handicap,” he said. “I played at a very high rate.”

He still laughs about the times he’d be invited to golf outings, and friends and acquaintances would wager bets about the game.

“They’d say, ‘Are you OK with that? We can spot you a couple of strokes if you need them,’” Baggett said. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and 90 percent of the time, they’d walk off the course scratching their heads wondering how they got beat by a one-armed guy.”

Post-Polio Syndrome

But he learned the hard way as an adult about post-polio syndrome. The condition affects people years after their initial polio infection, causing gradual muscle weakness and atrophy, and has no cure, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

“What I learned is you will get post-polio eventually, 10 to 40 years after,” Baggett said. “Every polio person is different, and post-polio is dictated by how serious their polio was.”

By age 41, he was no longer able to play golf.

“But I didn’t know what was going on with my body. I knew nothing about post-polio. It had not reached the mainstream yet,” he said.

Around this time, he returned to his roots of working with dogs. His father raised hunting dogs, bluetick coonhounds, and from the time he was 7 years old until he was a teenager, it was Baggett’s job to clean their pens and feed them.

“So, I went back to dogs,” he said.

He got his first German shepherd, who was just a few months old, in 1994, and it brought a sense of purpose to his life.

He also thrived in a decades-long career with GTE phone company, which merged with Bell Atlantic in the mid-1990s to form Verizon. He worked his way into a management position and "they wanted to groom me to go further,” Baggett said. “But my body was having problems.”

He learned about post-polio syndrome when he was 48 years old while attending a seminar in Ocala.

“That’s when I learned what the symptoms were,” he said. “It was everything that was happening to me. I was checking them off one by one.”

Discovering Work with Therapy Dogs

He retired from Verizon in 2003 at age 49, taking early retirement with access to his pension. After that, he wasn’t sure what to do.

“I took a year off and as a man of faith, I was praying and said, ‘Lord, what’s next?’” Baggett said.

He knew about programs where therapy dogs visited children in hospitals, but during his year of prayer, a child who had been receiving care at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa and had met such dogs, came into his church. This solidified that he wanted to work with a therapy dog program.

While he loved his dogs, he knew he didn’t have the right dog, yet, for such an initiative, and began searching for a new pup.

He found a young golden retriever puppy in Minnesota and brought the dog home to Florida at 8 weeks old.

“I knew I had something extremely rare in him with his attentiveness,” Baggett said.

He immediately started training the dog, named LaVie and called LA, at home, working with him for about 1,800 hours during the first year of his life alone.

“You don’t realize how much training happens at home,” Baggett said. “What I learned through obedience training is once you walk out that front door, the entire scene changes for a dog. Their intuitiveness, they start observing everything around them, and so much training happens when you’re with them.”

He and LA started visiting children at St. Joseph’s Hospital on Nov. 19, 2004, and worked with youths with a range of experiences — special needs kids, chronically ill children, sexually abused minors, and even visits to schools for the Great American Teach-In and other programs.

“The sexual abuse cases were probably the most horrific stuff,” he said. “Boy, it was just mind-boggling to see how the lawyer and the social worker would have to talk to the dog and the child would look at the dog and talk to the dog and how they communicated.”

LA lived for nearly 15 years and Baggett eventually got another golden retriever, Eli, who did similar work in the community.

The two dogs had very different personalities, he added. “Eli was a goofball and LA was the guy who takes care of everybody.”

Continuing His Work

Eli, sadly, died in June, he said. Now, Baggett is searching for another dog to continue this work.

He is also raising money for a mobility van to help him with both day-to-day life and his work with therapy dogs.

Over time, he has become reliant on his powerchair, though he can walk a short distance, and the van will help immensely, he said.

“At age 50, I lost feeling in my left leg, and it started getting weaker. I couldn’t do much, and I can’t do a whole lot about it.” he said. “When you get polio, it destroys the muscles in your body, and what happens as you age is your body’s neurons look for muscles to attach to. Now that you’re aging, you have less muscle mass already, and now your neurons are starting to run out of places to attach to.”

Baggett added, “All I’m trying to do is be independent. And I love helping people, so I want to keep doing this work.”