Sunday was a big day for me. Not only was I visiting South Carolina’s Darlington Raceway — one of NASCAR’s most historic racetracks — for the first time, but I was also picking up my “hard card,” an annual NASCAR credential that signifies you’re a garage regular with an important role.
It’s my first hard card after following the sport for 16 years. Even though it’s just a piece of plastic, it means I belong.
But my day ended before it ever began, and I didn’t see a single lap of the race. Instead, I ended up in the Darlington medical center.
Let’s rewind to pre-Darlington. I live in Texas, but I was in Charlotte, North Carolina for the grand opening of Ten Tenths Motor Club, a new club track across the street from where NASCAR competes at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Ten Tenths is a joint project between Speedway Motorsports, which owns and operates Charlotte Motor Speedway, and Rick Hendrick, who owns the Hendrick Motorsports NASCAR team. They brought me and a bunch of other media out to see the facility and watch Historic Trans-Am racing, as well as see two Mercedes-AMG Project Ones within feet of each other at the Heritage Invitational car show. It all rocked.
My husband and I decided to stay after the Ten Tenths programming to visit the Goodyear 400 at Darlington for the first time, because historic NASCAR tracks have an atmosphere to them. I’ve seen Darlington’s tarsnakes and red-and-white walls on television for years, but to witness them in person feels historic. We wanted that.
We rode to Darlington with our friend JR Houston, an engineer for the 23XI Racing NASCAR Cup Series team, and his father. The plan was to enjoy the 400-mile race, film videos and take photos for media coverage, then pack up and leave once JR’s team finished the race and wrapped up. (I’m putting the photos in this story so you can see how good of a job my husband did.)
The race started at 3:30 p.m. local time, and we got to the infield when the garage opened at 11 a.m. so JR could work. That gave my husband and me time to run around, see our friends, tour the track, and experience something new. But I never got that far.
Just after noon — three hours before the start of the race — illness hit me like a frying pan. I lost my lunch. My breakfast. My everything. It felt like an exorcism. I threw off my hard card, which I’d had for about 30 minutes, so none of the upchuck would hit it. I stumbled out of the bathroom and asked 23XI for some nausea medication, which they kindly gave me. It stayed in my system for 12 minutes before shooting out of my nose.
I couldn’t hold down water, food, or medication. I had the shivers. Any time I stood up, I immediately collapsed back down. I was so dizzy and disoriented that at one point, I needed a place to sit while outside and plopped down behind a generator spewing hot exhaust on me. I didn’t realize until two very kind medics came over and pulled me up.
It’s been years since I felt ill enough to seek urgent medical care. Part of that is because I live in America, and my bar for seeking medical care is high. Part of that is because I just don’t get violently ill very often. But here I was, in Darlington, violently ill.
Then I remembered my hard card. NASCAR’s infield care center, where drivers go to be checked after certain severities of wrecks, was open to me with the hard card. It’s a service from NASCAR, and the staff would be there to respond to routine and urgent needs through the weekend. I’d sent my husband off to take photos and video during one of my breaks in pain and suffering, but called him back over to walk me to the care center.
It was like one of those scorching desert scenes in a movie, where the main character is dragging their feet through the sand while dehydrated and hallucinating. I was so disoriented that I dropped a full bottle of medicine and didn’t notice until I reached the care center and no longer saw it in my hands.
The care center administered fluids and nausea medication through an IV, which was the first thing I could keep down all day. They allowed me to stay in a medical bed as long as I wanted, and when I decided to leave, they took me wherever I needed to go on a golf cart.
The medication wasn’t a permanent fix, and I’ve been varying degrees of “stuck in bed” for three days. The only NASCAR action I can recall from Darlington was zombie-walking from one infield building to another during the race, seeing a sliver of cars go by in the distance, and thinking: “I guess I’ll have to watch what happened in this race next week.”
I don’t know when I’ll go back to Darlington. But I do know that possessing a NASCAR hard card — a dream I’ve had since I was a kid — now has a double meaning for me. It means that an hour into having one, I was able to seek urgent medical care without thinking: “How much will this cost me?”
And that, honestly, got me through the day.
Have you ruled out being “with child”? The symptoms sound similar to when we first found out the little one was on the way. I know everyone’s body is different and reacts differently so you mileage may vary. But it was the first thing that came to mind when I read this.
Wow, so sorry to hear about you getting so sick! It’s great that you were able to have access to that medical care, and glad you’re feeling better
Hope you are on the mend!
I think you just solved the healthcare crisis for everyone, hard cards for everyone!
As soon as I read the headline, I had the comment “condolences on your upcoming bankruptcy” locked and loaded, glad to hear this won’t be the case.
Were you dining with Cody Bellinger?
WOW, that sounds exactly like the food poisoning I contracted in high school (complete with vomiting through the nose, which is an indescribable horror). At least I was at home, but I almost threw up on the dog while staggering from the couch to the bathroom, and I still feel bad about that. Never figured out what made me sick, but the most likely culprit was a hamburger place that got written up for cross contamination (and other issues that resulted in a ‘B’ rating) about a week later.
Glad to see you here, and hope you’re feeling better!
I vote norovirus. Luckily my recent bout hit while I was home, so I could safely curl up on the bathroom floor, shivering and moaning in between bouts of diarrhea. Moving upstairs later felt like An Insurmountable Task. If it had happened at work or elsewhere, I’d have probably needed medical support, too.
now that you have your hard card are you going to spot for some teams?
Look at you being like your friend Tyler Reddick, throwing up all over Darlington Speedway.
As I get older, the more I’m like “I will gladly pay more taxes to have this”. There is a quality of life improvement solely in not having to debate with myself whether I am sick enough to justify medical care and the cost and headaches it will entail.
100%. Even if it’s not my own healthcare. I want Joe Blow down the street to be able to get cancer treatment without bankrupting his family.
With what we pay for premiums, deductibles, and copays, a tax hike would probably be cheaper anyway.
A coworker recently had to call 911, his wife was having an issue and 911 dispatched an ambulance. They stabilized her and transported her to the hospital in the next town. He later received a bill for 3K because the ambulance co was “out of network”. He pays $200+ per pay period for insurance.
We live in a midsized city with one ambulance service. It’s ‘out of network’ with the major insurance Blue Cross????
That whole “network” thing is wild.
A few years I was on vacation and was in an accident. I was very lucky that the care I got was in network despite being in a different region of the country. I can’t image being on the hook for the whole bill because “out of network”.
The last time I had to go to the ER, I got hit with an out of network charge from the doctor who saw me. The hospital I went to was in network, but they didn’t have enough docs to cover the shift and contracted out to additional doctors, who were evidently not in said network. Our medical system is spectacular.
This is of the great things about living in Australia – a health system that actually works. We do have private health insurance here, and the system isn’t perfect, but the public health system actually works and is available to the average person at no cost. Also pharmaceutical prescriptions are subsidised and affordable. Without this, my wife’s medications would probably cost as much as I earn. Plus, with all her medical issues and all the surgery she has needed over the years, the best we could hope for is bankruptcy, but more likely she would have died before I even got to meet her!
Having just read this article I found it sickening 😉
Yay, Alanis is here! That sounds like the time I got a floater in my ear and had the most horrible vertigo. Spent several hours in the ER getting 5L of saline and Ativan while lying under a heat lamp. Definitely the worst I have ever felt. At least I was kept entertained by the guy one bed over who was hallucinating and talking to people / things that weren’t there.
Why do I feel like a wheelbarrow full of shrimp was the ultimate culprit?
Nah, her love for Rainforest Cafe and Applebee’s finally caught up with her…
Just kidding Alanis, great to see you here and I hope you’re feeling better soon.
Also miss you on DRS, the F1 season just isn’t the same without you guys!
Oh dear, that sounds rather nasty.
Hope you’re feeling better Alanis!
My story was college. I lived on Hot Pockets. I had them from breakfast, lunch and dinner. Cheap, quick and filling. One day, I ate one and it tasted “off”. I took it to mean that I had eaten an entire box of Little Debbie’s Swiss Cake Rolls (frozen of course) and my taste buds were fried. Ends up that box of Hot Pockets must have thawed out somewhere and been put back in the freezer.
2 days later, there was a knock on the door. I had befriended one of the nightwatchman and he would come around and hang out. When I answered it, I could barely walk. He took one look at me, and ran back to his car, where he re-appeared with two bags of Saline. He was a volunteer EMT. We sat around and talked while he ran Saline into each arm and put some sort of meds in the bags as well. I have no memory of the 2 days from Hot Pockets to Saline, but 2 weeks later, I could still struggle to hold down toast and lived on sips of Gatorade and little else.
I have not even looked at a box of Hot Pockets since without feeling queasy.
The good news what that I lost a TON of weight. The bad news was that I didn’t lose my taste for Little Debbies and gained it back with interest once I could hold them down.
[obligatory Jim Gaffigan ‘diarrhea pockets’ video goes here]