NASCAR: Swindell takes step forward

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the one Amy Swindell recently posted on her Facebook page cannot be calculated.

It showed her son, Kevin, getting ready to walk again only 10 months after being paralyzed in a sprint car crash in Knoxville, Iowa.

"Better than any Victory Lane photo I've got," said the wife of sprint car legend Sammy Swindell.

Steadied by therapists Cassidy and Derrick at Frazier Rehab Institute (left), young Swindell was standing with the aid of walking canes and about to embark on an achievement that made winning four straight Chili Bowls look pedestrian.

"We walked 370 feet without a break today," he revealed to RACER on Thursday evening. "I never would have thought that walking the length of a football field in 15 minutes would be so hard.

"But it's so nice to be standing up again. I got so use to looking at things from such a low point of view that it felt like I was 7 feet tall."

It looked plenty bleak on Aug. 13, 2015, when his car slammed down on the frame rails after a flip during a heat race at the Knoxville Nationals.

One of the best all-around racers in the country broke the L1 and T7 vertebrae in his back. The damage was so bad to his L1 that doctors removed a rib and used it to build a new vertebra during a pair of eight-hour surgeries at Des Moines Mercy Hospital.

"They told me after the first surgery that I was paralyzed from the belly button down and I'd never have feelings again and probably never walk again," Swindell said from his apartment in Louisville, just a few minutes away from the Frazier Rehab Institute where he's been since September.

"So considering my prognosis, I think we're making good progress."

Amazing is more like it. Thanks to his youth, physical condition, fiancée Jordan Armstrong, friends, family, the therapists in Louisville and some of that good 'ol Swindell spunk, the 26-year-old second-generation racing star is beating the odds.

"I think it helped that I was in pretty good shape and had some good doctors in Iowa so when I got here they handled me a little different," he continued. "I got more treatment earlier and we just kept plugging away.

"I got a little more hope with each movement."

"Things atrophy when you lay there for a few weeks and I lost all my strength," he said, "so it's been a matter of rebuilding it, and I feel stronger every day."

Swindell was operating a three-wheeler and pushing the car he owns a couple weeks ago, so the natural question is, when does he think he might be able to start racing again?

"I'm not interested in driving if I can't be as competitive as I was," he responded. "Winning is why I raced and I'm not interested in just driving around. I want to get healthy and healed as much as I can and then I'll take a look at everything.

"I was a crew chief at the Chili Bowl and I enjoyed that. I think I'd be pretty good at it and I'm not opposed to doing it."

For now, Swindell is literally taking life a step at a time, and that's a wonderful sight.

"The hardest part is that you can't feel much so balance is difficult and knowing your feet are under you. I feel a little more here and there and sometimes in places I didn't feel before.

"But you can't make it come back; all you can do is keep working and pushing yourself and hope you keep improving. They've never given me a timeline here. They just said they'd keep working with me until I reached a plateau.

"I got around decent with a walker and now I'm using these walking canes and hopefully I'll get down to a single cane. And maybe someday I'll be walking around again on my own."