Where in the world was Gregg Moss: sidelined a year by illness, TV journalist is back.

• Author: Beck, Cathie
• Position: Cover Story

Gregg Moss has enjoyed a business journalist's career any reporter would envy. In 1993, Moss met President Clinton when the Denver Business Journal--Moss was associate publisher--won the national Small Business Media Advocate of the Year Award. In 1995, "Advertising and Marketing Reviews" gave him its up-and-coming media-personality award. In 1999, his TV career won him a statewide U.S. Small Business Administration award. He had a quirky, high-energy, self-effacing style, and he was being invited more and more frequently to host business events: morning, noon, and night. But fast forward to 2002.

"One day I was on a live shoot in Sterling," the popular TV journalist says now. "The night before, I hadn't been feeling well.

"I woke up to do a shoot, and I could barely get through it.

"I called home and told my wife, 'I'm really feeling bad and I need to see a doctor--now.'"

But Moss' doctors couldn't figure out what went wrong with him that day. After a series of inconclusive tests, they sent him home, even though he still wasn't well. Then, "One day in May 2003, I was walking off of the news set, and my arms went numb," he said. "So, like a dope, I drove myself to the clinic.

"At my age (he was 38), you don't walk into a clinic and say 'chest pain.' The clinic immediately ordered an ambulance and took me to the hospital. They thought I was having a heart attack.

"For two months they did stress tests and EKGs and a series of MRIs and spinal taps. "When you get the diagnosis of MS and you're told you won't be walking in six months because it's progressing so fast, you're terrified," he tells an interviewer. "You really don't know what your future holds. In my business, it is critical to move around. It's high-energy work and long days. I couldn't do it."

And that's when Gregg Moss and his supercharged journalism career came to a crippling, debilitating and mystifyingly sudden halt.

Moss practically disappeared, leaving a growing following among TV viewers and business people wondering exactly what Moss later embraced as a name for one of his television features:

"Where in the World is Gregg Moss?"

Rumors that MS had struck down the father of two children circulated on the business lunch circuit, and left many of his colleagues in metro-Denver business journalism wondering whether a powerful competitor was no longer among them. For Moss' family the strain was naturally worse.

Britta, Gregg's wife, felt helpless as she watched her husband take...