Nobody wants to scare Trevor Bayne, or his family, and that likely explains the public show of optimism that surrounds Roush Fenway Racing as the 21-year-old Daytona 500 winner undergoes tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Bayne tweeted to his fans at the weekend that he was at the Mayo (a medical research group of hospitals and clinics) after team owner Jack Roush told a reporter for Motor Racing Network that his driver was back in the hospital.
Bayne was originally admitted to hospital early in April after apparently being bitten by an insect. He was discharged and drove in two races and handled a full program of sponsor obligations. However, some of the symptoms that landed him in hospital initially, including double vision and nausea, apparently reappeared and that led to his most recent hospitalization.
Now, we all love the Spider-Man saga of Peter Parker being bitten by a spider and becoming a superhero but in real life something like that can be horrid.
I can’t divulge the name, but a well-known, pre-2000, Canadian racing driver was bitten by an insect or bug of some type and has suffered immeasurably since. A life has literally been destroyed.
I have another friend, a guy I’ve known for years, who underwent a knee replacement (he’s an old hockey player) and then was bitten and although his life has not been destroyed in the same way as my first example, it has been an awful time for him and his family: surgeries, antibiotics, pain killers. He now writes for a living and can do that. But he won't be playing golf anytime soon - if ever again.
So there’s nothing funny about what’s going on with Trevor Bayne.
According to USA Today, FoxSports.com reported that Roush told Joe Moore of MRN during the Friday broadcast of the NASCAR Nationwide Series race from Richmond, Va., that Bayne "woke up on Monday morning (last week), and he had double vision, and we said, ‘Wait a minute.’ His father and I had a meeting, we met on the phone. We need to take him to the Mayo Clinic and figure out what's going on so we make sure we don't overlook something that could be bad for him.
"He's been in the clinic all week. They've done some tests on him. They haven't found anything sinister. There's nothing wrong with him that they can find that would preclude him from having a normal life, a normal career and doing all the things he's destined to do."
Roush Fenway Racing president Steve Newmark said that out of respect for Bayne’s family, he wouldn’t say anything else about the driver’s condition.
"My hope is what we find out is that it was just benign, and that Roush Fenway overreacted, but whatever the result is, what I've told the family is, ‘You tell us how you want us to handle this; if you want us to tell people what happened or not.’ We'll see how that plays out."
As I reported in my Monday Morning Racing roundup blog post, Bayne himself was tweeting to fans that he was "still at the hospital! Don't think it’s related to the bite. But we'll see! God has something cool going on that we can't yet see!"
Bayne also tweeted, "Proverbs 3:5-8 thanks for everyone’s prayers."
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