Hi everyone,
Here’s all you need to know about the crash that almost took Jerry Nadeau’s life:
He had oatmeal for breakfast.
That’s all Nadeau remembers about May 2, 2003, the day he lost control of the No. 01 U.S. Army Pontiac and slammed into a wall during practice at Richmond International Raceway.
On Wednesday, nearly seven years after his near-fatal wreck, Nadeau spoke to about 100 people at the Stony Hill Inn in Bethel as a human ghost, the NASCAR driver who cheated death at 120 mph.
The Danbury native and Abbott Tech graduate was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for Newtown Youth & Family Services, a local nonprofit mental health clinic and youth service group.
It was the first public speaking engagement for Nadeau in three years.
“I still can’t feel my left side,” Nadeau told the crowd. “You know how your leg falls asleep sometimes when you’re sitting on the couch?
“Well, that pins-and-needles feeling, that’s how the left side of my body feels all the way down, all the time.”
Even now, it is a painful admission for Nadeau, a once-promising driver who won the NAPA 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2000.
Nadeau, 40, understands there will be no more victory laps, no more smoking tires in the infield. And it tears his heart out every time he wrestles that reality.
Motor skills and motor sports are inseparable, you see. They always have been.
For the rest of his days, Nadeau will live with a traumatic brain injury that “rattled my cage” as he calls it, the injury that left three lesions on the right side of his brain.
At the time of his accident, the black box in Nadeau’s car at Richmond rated his crash impact at 140 Gs, or 140 times the force of gravity — the equivalent of jumping off a 10-story building, the doctors told him.
To read more about Jerry Nadeau’s road to recovery, check out my “Take on Life” column Friday.
Only in the print edition of The News-Times.
