Fun-loving grown-ups often lament that the mark of being an adult means having to work on one's birthday.

But Cale Aronson was grateful to be celebrating behind his desk earlier this month at ACE Racing Clutches headquarters at Sullivan, Mo., southwest of St. Louis.

The IHRA Pro Stock driver, wheelchair-bound since his April 25 Nitro Jam crash at Jupiter, Fla.'s Palm Beach International Raceway, was delighted to report that the piles of paperwork that have crowded his office, new projects, and ringing phones were welcome on his 33rd birthday – even though the demands leave him falling asleep instantly each evening.

"Business as usual," Aronson said proud of such progress.

Aronson has undergone plenty of grueling physical therapy, notably at a Miami medical center with on-site encouragement from injured Top Fuel racer Darrell Gwynn. And he has made tremendous strides toward regaining use of his legs following the fracture of a neck vertebra (a C-5 compression fracture) But official rehabilitation sessions in Missouri will start in the next week or so.

"Surprisingly, I haven’t started," he said, explaining that the reasons for the delay are twofold.

"I really didn’t care to own a wheelchair van, knowing I don’t really need one of those forever," he said. He studied all the logistics of traveling to his appointments and elsewhere, trying to figure out something that I could get in and out of that wasn't a pain in the butt. We kind of got through that."

The other reason is that he wants to use his insured "rehab days" wisely.

"The function in my legs has gotten a lot better, literally by the week," Aronson told Competition Plus' Bobby Bennett. "You go a couple, three months into it and all of a sudden you have more capacity to do more. That's when you want to be doing the most of your rehab. You don’t want to use it up before you need it."

The one catch in all this happy news is that since he has returned home, he said he has "gotten more nerve pain in my leg. It feels like it’s a burning sensation." He said the pain often wakes up wife Tinzy five to 10 times a night. She helps him reposition his legs for relief. "Sometimes it'll last 30 minutes. Sometimes it’ll last three hours. Sometimes it'll stay gone," he said.

"It's nerve regeneration. It's just par for the course, Aronson said, adding that Dr. Barth Green, who directed his treatment in Florida, told him he had an "incomplete injury." He said Green's advice was "The more 'incomplete' you are, the more chance you have for the recovery [and] the more sensation, the pain, the spasms, the more you'll have."

Wryly, Aronson said, "I definitely have plenty of those."

The feeling, he said, isn’t exactly like that of his legs "falling asleep." Instead, he said, "The best way to put it is the sensation is kind of like when you have frostbite on the bottom of your feet and to start to think if somebody touches them, it actually feels really good. My dad [Chuck Aronson, one of the pioneers of the Mountain Motor Pro Stock movement] and Tinzy just spend a lot of time moving my legs around, massaging the muscles. You can actually see [progress] – my calf muscles for a long time looked just kind of limp. They didn’t look solid. Now when they're [stretched out] on the bed, they've got mass back to 'em. The muscle tone's coming back."

Aronson's Mustang swung across the center line, turned left and hit the wall as the car flipped onto its roof. It skidded upside down across the track, and his injury occurred when his head smashed against the roof.

"I hit the wall just under 8Gs but hit the roof at 2½. The problem is with 2½, it turns 240 pounds into 400 pounds. Smashing your head with 400 pounds, it wasn't good," he said.

"It was definitely an interesting experience. Everything went numb when I hit the roof. I definitely was not expecting this was going to be the result," Aronson said.

Aronson even calls himself lucky.

"You get your eyes big-time wide open whenever you realize that people have these accidents happen to them – a car crash that was beyond out of their control – and they just don't have the ability to compensate," he said. "There's been a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have been able to do without all the support I've had from fellow racers and the community. I mean, I've got a lot of help and support. It made things a lot easier. I've been very fortunate. That's just something that I would express big-time: Without everybody's help, it would have been really difficult to do what I've done."

He said he plans to donate his motorized wheelchair to someone in need when he is done with it.

"There's a lot of people who need stuff," Aronson said. "There's going to be people that need it."

He hopes that day will come sooner rather than later.

"There's no real time frame on it," Aronson said. "It's going to be one of those things where if I was guessing . . . for the next two to four months, I would say, I'll probably be in the position where I can stand and I can move. But Dr. Green advised me, 'For the first six months, you're going to get 50 percent of what you can do back. But then it’s going to take the next six months to a year to really be able to get everything working the way you want it to be.' That being said, he said it also depends on how hard you want to work at it. So me, I don’t stay still very long."

Returning to work at ACE is proof. And it has been therapy in itself, Aronson said.

"When I started coming back in here, it put me in a lot better mood," he said.

So he's one year older, more optimistic every day, and closer to a remarkably complete and completely remarkable recovery.