Racing to the Finish Read online

  I looked at him, smiled, and said, “What?” I paused, kept smiling, and added, “You didn’t say the word.”

  Racecar drivers call it the r-word, as in retirement. I said that I had every intent of honoring the remainder of my contract with Hendrick Motorsports, through the end of 2017, and I explained that I had already had a conversation with Rick about an extension. I left out the “I want to quit” part.

  I was asked if I’d had that r-word conversation with Amy or others during my month on the sidelines. I answered flatly: “No. My doctor thinks that to get through the therapy and get through the symptoms, you don’t need to be adding stress to your life. Stress slows down the process. So going into those conversations isn’t even necessary at this particular point. The point right now is just to get healthy. To get right. I’m not thinking about the what-ifs. I’m listening to my doctors . . . we went into this with the intention of getting back into the car if I get cleared and I think that’s a possibility and so do my doctors.

  “As Rick likes to say, I’ve got unfinished business. I’m not ready to stop racing. I’m not ready to quit.”

  I might not have been thinking about the what-ifs yet, but to me it was now clearer than ever that everyone else sure seemed to be thinking about them. That press conference wore me out, as did something that I added to the agenda at the last minute, but it was totally worth it. We weren’t originally scheduled to make an appearance in the garage, but since I was there I insisted on it. There was no way I was going to be at the racetrack and not go see my guys on the No. 88 Chevy.

  I missed them. I already knew that I did, but being there that day reminded me of what I really missed by being out of my car. It wasn’t going fast or racing, or really anything about the actual racecar. It was about seeing my guys. That had been taken away from me, and now I knew how much it truly meant to me.

  The Watkins Glen garage layout is a bit funky, certainly a lot different than the standard ovals, so we did a lot of walking through gates and crowds and even up and down some hills. The fans went a little crazy in a couple of spots. Micky wanted me to get some max exposure therapy, right? Well, this was it. Seeing the team was so great, but after a few minutes I was ready to go. They needed to get back to work, and I needed to get back home to do my own work.

  Aug 6: Went to the racetrack yesterday. Did media. The garage brought out a terrible drunk feeling. It calmed down some on the way home. Woke up this morning with real bad balance. Eyes are working more poorly than normal.

  The next two and a half weeks brought some great highs and some big lows. The new exercises added to my to-do list were much more intense. I realized that was a sign of forward progress. My symptoms had been pushed farther out and we had to keep pushing me physically to keep chasing those symptoms and aggravating them. Amy and I went to our house in Key West for a few days. During the day I did my exercises. In the evening we made a point to go out and interact with the crowds. Both felt good.

  Aug 11–14 in Key West. Had a great time. Normal symptoms. No increased issues in busy places. No major changes or problems.

  I brought those good feelings home. They didn’t last.

  Aug 16 went to JRM and to eat out with Amy. Symptoms increased more than I expected. Balance and eyes struggled with any change in environment.

  It’s starting to feel like a broken record, isn’t it? Imagine living it. As I’d told the media at Watkins Glen three weeks earlier, improvement wasn’t coming as fast as I wanted. As great as it had been to see everyone at the track, now they felt a million miles away. It was just me and Amy again in the garage-turned-gym. Part of my prescribed activities now included playing basketball. But even that was supposed to be alone.

  I didn’t hear much from current drivers. I might not have heard from any of them, save for a few text messages. As odd as this might sound, that doesn’t bother me. I honestly can’t remember the last time I called a driver to check in on him when he was out of his car with injuries. It sounds cold, but it’s just not really in our nature. It doesn’t mean you aren’t worried about them, but the NASCAR season is the longest season in professional sports. When you’re in the middle of it, you’re just getting from one race to the next with a schedule full of obligations in between. Someone who isn’t on that train is out of sight, out of mind.

  I would hear from Kelley. She was hearing from Rick and other people at Hendrick Motorsports. They were all hearing from sponsors. No one wanted to be pushy, but they were hoping for a solid timeline for my return. It’s like dominoes falling. The first one is just a nudge. “How’s he feeling?” But by the time you get a few nudges going, one hits another and another and the one that hits you, it’s not a nudge at all. Kelley often found herself that last domino, the one that hit me, and that led to some pretty heated conversations. It wasn’t her fault, but man, we did some arguing a couple of times during all of this.

  There was one day in particular when it was me, Kelley, Amy, and L.W. in the den at our house during one of my lower points of the recovery. I tried to explain to Kelley how I was feeling and how I was wrestling with whether or not to come back to racing and I needed her advice. What did she think I should do? Well, she would automatically go into business manager mode. If you stop now, you will be leaving this much money on the table . . . your retirement portfolio would look like this . . . your relationship with this sponsor would look like this. I told her that I didn’t want my business manager’s opinion; I wanted to know what my sister thought. She struggled with that request. Wasn’t she worried about my health? Wasn’t she worried about what might happen to me if I got into another big crash? Of course she was worried about those things, but it was hard for her to express that. So we did a lot of yelling that day. Like, all over the house.

  Kelley remembers that argument well. When she talks about it she shakes her head, smiles, and says, “Keep in mind, now, we are Earnhardts, the children of the Intimidator. Backing down during an argument, that’s not really in our DNA.” Our whole lives, she’s had to strike an impossible balance, taking care of me on a lot of different levels. I already told you, this is the girl who enrolled in military school just so she could look after me. She knows that sometimes it takes her a minute to move from one role to the other, from business manager to sister, but she does it. Asking her to take off one hat for the other, I know that’s a big ask, but I had to know what my sister felt. She admits that maybe business manager mode helped her avoid the emotions of sister mode, but eventually sister emerged. Naturally, she wanted what was best for me and my health; she just needed to understand it all better. I think that taking her to some of my appointments with Micky helped with that.

  But know this. Even when we argued, I never questioned Kelley’s intentions. I never have.

  You know which drivers did call me? The retired ones. Guys who had suffered head injuries and wanted me to know I wasn’t alone. I also heard from a lot of other guys who said they had suffered concussions, kept them secret, and were now worried about the long-term impact of their stubbornness. I gave them all the phone number of Dr. Micky Collins.

  At my most frustrating low points—and there were so many during the summer of 2016—I would call Micky. When he’d given me his personal cell phone number back in 2012 and told me to call him anytime, I told him he might regret that. I wasn’t joking. But neither was he. Whenever I called, no matter what time of day or night, Micky answered. If I needed to talk for an hour, he’d listen for an hour. I would tell him about every headache, panic attack, and stumble, and he’d tell me why it was happening and assure me that if I kept doing what he’d told me to then one day it would stop.

  If I called him right now and needed to talk for an hour, he’d still listen. And I do. Since the first time I shook hands with him on October 26, 2012, he has been there for me. I will never forget that.

  Wednesday, August 24, 2016

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  When I returned to see Micky in person
for our third 2016 appointment, I knew it had the potential to not be a great examination. There was no question that I had improved pretty dramatically when it came to my symptoms. Only a few weeks earlier I had still been having nausea and dizziness even when I was at rest. Now, even when they really put me through my paces in the UPMC gym, it was becoming more difficult to trigger a lot of that. That was good.

  But the problems with my eyes were still pretty bad. During what they call Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening, or VOMS, Micky and his staff would put me through a series of activities where I would have to track an object with my eyes, and while I did that they would closely monitor the actions of my eyeballs.

  They want to see smooth movements, not jerky or staggered jumps, as a patient’s eyes track a moving object, or a stationary object while the patient is in motion. They have what they call smooth pursuit, which is exactly what it sounds like. How smoothly do your eyes pursue what they are focused on? There’s saccadic movement, which is basically your eyes moving around to take in all that is included in the view before them. Watch someone’s eyes as they watch a movie or TV. They don’t stay fixed on one spot, do they? They move around, looking at every corner of the screen and adding it all up to create the full picture. Doctors watched my eyes to see how well they did that, both horizontally and vertically.

  We did Vestibular-Ocular Reflex testing, or VOR, which measures how well your head, eyes, and inner ear work together. This is your body’s gyroscope. When you move your head left or right like you’re saying no, your eyes compensate by instinctively turning left or right to counter your head movements and stay focused on what’s in front of you. This is what I was working on during the exercises when I would move my head and eyes around while walking, all while reading an eye chart taped to the wall in front of me.

  The good news was that none of what we did was causing any big dizziness. The bad news is that my eyes still weren’t working in tandem like they should. In Micky’s notes from this visit the term used was accommodation insufficiency. What that meant was that my eyes were still having difficulty focusing. My afternoon visit to see Dr. Steinhafel only underlined my focus issues. He gave me a new pair of chunky glasses to help with my latent hyperopia. Basically put, it’s farsightedness that can be masked. Your eyes know something is wrong and they figure out a way to work around it. It creates a tremendous amount of strain and you don’t even realize it. My eyes needed a rest.

  My take-home workout plan now included a much longer list of eye-specific tests. There would be even more walking and tossing and shaking of the head, all while focusing on specific targets. But now the doctors started adding a new ingredient to the recipe: darkness. I was to start walking the hills of my property on various surfaces and I was to do it at dusk, as the light started changing from day to night. I was also to do some of my gym exercises in the dark, eventually mixing in some overstimulation by way of a disco ball. Seriously. It would be just another step in pushing my brain and eyes to have to process a lot of information and eventually work normally under those conditions. I was also to stop playing basketball alone, and start inviting my friends back for some three-on-three, though it had to be non-contact. I was also supposed to continue to ramp up my exposure to crowded public settings.

  Amy and I would do my workout in the mornings and then find places to go in the evening, whether it be the race shop, a restaurant, or a Walmart, wherever I was exposed to big crowds, bright lights, and noise. Doug Duchardt had been all over me to start attending our big Tuesday debrief meetings at Hendrick Motorsports, when all four race teams sit and discuss what happened at the last race and make plans for the next one. I’d always felt like that might be weird, seeing as how I’d be the only guy in the room who hadn’t actually raced. But now I would be going as part of my exposure therapy.

  In the weeks leading up to this visit, I had been starting to drive around a little during the day, but not much. Now they wanted me to start driving more. But only my street car. No racecars. The medical record from August 24 reads: “At this time, Dale does not meet criteria to return to racing given the results of his vestibular, exertion, and vision evaluations and the fact that medication has not reached therapeutic effectiveness.”

  Zoloft had been added to my meds, the goal being to “continue to dial down the part of Dale’s brain that focuses on his symptoms.” In other words, my anxiety was again hampering my forward progress. Micky telling me that I still wasn’t cleared and that our follow-up appointment would be in a month didn’t help that anxiety. Another month? So late September, at best? When the NASCAR postseason would have already started? I think, deep down, I knew that was coming. I wasn’t surprised by it. But the reality of adding it all up, that was still not any fun.

  Micky sensed anxiety building up in me and quickly worked to calm me down. He told me that he was really encouraged by the progress I was making and, yes, he knew that I was getting frustrated by the pace of it all, but that I was doing much better than I realized. But there was also a hard conversation that I needed to have about that long-term goal of “return to racing” and pausing to think about that phrase long-term goal. The stress of trying to shorten my return deadline as much as possible was hampering my progress by throwing gasoline onto my anxiety levels.

  Micky told me that as bad as I thought my situation was, it wasn’t really. Before he came into my exam room he had been with a professional football player who’d just signed a huge contract. Micky had to tell him that because of his concussions he was going to have to retire. He would never again get to play the game he loved.

  “That’s not the situation you are in, Dale. We can fix this. We are fixing this.” He reminded me that our goals for me were much higher than they were for most. “If our goal was to just get you back to a normal level of brain function, then we’d be close to done already. But we aren’t working to get you here . . .” He used his hand to place a mark in the air. “We are working to get you here . . .” He raised his hand above his head. “We aren’t working to get you to regular guy level. We are working to get you to racecar driver, elite athlete level. You are doing everything you need to do. But that goal is going to take more time. We need all the time we can get.”

  I wouldn’t be driving racecars again in 2016.

  CHAPTER 8

  TO RACE OR NOT TO RACE

  Walking to the elevator to leave Micky’s office that day, the strangest thing happened. I cried. I wasn’t weeping or anything, but I did shed a tear or two. I had Dr. Petty, Kelley, L.W., Mike Davis, and Amy with me. Both Mike and Amy were taken aback that I was getting so emotional. Mike says that he rewound through all the years we had worked together and even before then just watching me on TV, going all the way back to when my father died, and he couldn’t remember a single instance of seeing me cry. Amy reacted the same way. She had certainly seen me emotional before, but she wondered aloud why I was crying.

  I think the finality of the decision had a lot to do with it. But I also think it just proved that getting out of the car for the remainder of the season was the right thing to do. I could finally release a little bit of that stress and emotion around the whole mess, which had now been going on for so long. During that time, all the way back to 2012, I was always so focused on the rehab work or the coverups of how bad I felt that I hadn’t really ever allowed myself to go on and deal with the reality of it. Now I did.

  The sadness didn’t last long. We had to get back to work. And we had to let the world know I was out for the rest of the year. While we mapped out exactly how to do that, I wrote what ended up being the final note I would enter into my iPhone in 2016. I sound like a man who is relieved to be fully focused.

  Eyes see first improvement. Aug 30 2016.

  Sunday, September 4, 2016

  Darlington Raceway

  On September 1, the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, we sent out a press release that read: “Dale Earnhardt Jr., driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet SS for Hendrick M
otorsports, has not been medically cleared to compete for the remainder of the 2016 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season as he continues to recover from a concussion.” It went on to lay out the remaining twelve races and how they would be split up between Gordon and Bowman. In the end, I would miss eighteen races in 2016, half the season.

  On Saturday afternoon, a few hours before the green flag dropped on the Southern 500, I made an appearance in the Darlington Raceway media center to answer questions about that announcement and was joined onstage with Rick Hendrick and a special guest. Micky came down from Pittsburgh.

  I was so glad he was there. I had invited him personally for a number of reasons. First, I just wanted people to see him, to know who he was. Second, I had watched the press conferences held by Sidney Crosby, the great Pittsburgh Penguin hockey player, when he addressed his concussion issues, and he always had doctors at his side, including Micky at one point. When we made our announcement in 2012, I’d had Dr. Petty with me. Third, I knew Rick and I were going to be hit with specific questions about concussions and brain science, and we didn’t need to try to answer those. Finally, and this was the most important, I wanted Micky to have the platform and the stage that I knew this press conference would give him. I knew that this was going to be a big deal, that it would be carried live by ESPN, FOX, NBC, and others. There would be people watching who were suffering like me, a lot of them probably keeping it a secret like I had. This was a chance for Micky to reach out to them and reassure them like he had done for me. They could get help and get themselves fixed up. They just needed to know that.

  The room was packed. The Southern 500 is one of auto racing’s biggest events. In recent years they’ve turned it into a NASCAR Throwback weekend, when everyone runs classic paint schemes on their racecars and so many people dress up in old uniforms it looks like a NASCAR Halloween party. The theme for this race was the 1970s, right down my alley. Among the audience at my press conference was Barry Williams, aka Greg Brady from The Brady Bunch, there to sing the national anthem.