Friday, April 22, 2011
Associated Press
Brian Vickers had a lot of questions when he suddenly found himself in the hospital last year. Doctors discovered blood clots in the driver’s left leg and near his lungs, then a hole in his heart.
He was able to overcome those health issues, but found himself facing another big question. And finding the answer to whether he wanted to resume his NASCAR Sprint Cup career wasn’t as easy as he expected.
“At first, my focus was on living. And then it immediately turned to racing, and how do I get back in the race car?” the 27-year-old Vickers said. “Then I had to stop and think, do I want to go back in the race car? It seems like a silly question, but when you’ve gone through all that, you start looking at your whole life from a different perspective.”
When Vickers was pondering his racing future, his first thought was that he wanted to come back because of the one goal he hadn’t accomplished — to win a Sprint Cup championship.
“Then I realized it was more than that. If I came back it couldn’t just be about that. It had to be about something more,” he said. “I came back because I just love racing. I love going fast, I love being in race cars. I love what I do. If I never win a championship, I’ll still be happy that I came back. If I do win a championship, I’ll be even happier.”
Vickers went to the hospital last May after having excruciating pain during a visit to Washington D.C., though he had already experienced some symptoms in the weeks before that before the pain began to grow.
There had been a tingling and loss of feeling in his left hand. On the bicycle rides he took that usually covered 60-70 miles, he was out of breath after only 15 miles.
“Being young and healthy and stubborn, stubborn being probably the most prominent of the three, and a race car driver, you just think these things will go away,” Vickers said. “A lot of times deep down, we don’t want to admit it, but we don’t want to go to the hospital because we’re afraid we’re going to be told we can’t race.”
Vickers missed the final two-thirds of the Cup season after being hospitalized.
“It was difficult and challenging, but I truly feel that I walked away a better person, so I’m very thankful for the experience,” he said.