By all estimations, including his own, Cale Thomas is the epitome of a driver who shouldn’t be standing in the present day.
His is a story that’s chock- full of enough irony that it seems impossible, except it isn’t.
If not for a racing crash that quite easily could have killed him, Thomas wouldn’t be alive to tell his tale.
Now 22, the Fairland, Ind., native was a fresh-faced 18-year-old in 2016, when his story begins. He was racing a sprint car at Ohio’s Atomic Speedway.
The Atomic event was meant to be a tune-up for a run in the Knoxville Nationals at Iowa’s Knoxville Raceway. Instead, it took a turn that left Thomas in the hospital, and later put his career into flux.
It’s a night that, to this very day, Thomas can recount as if it was yesterday.
“If you’ve ever been to Atomic, there are no walls after turn one and then all the way down the backstretch … and I think it was just hot laps, which saying that is kind of embarrassing, but it was just really rough into (turn) one. That’s a place that a lot of people actually flip in or have problems if they aren’t careful. It’s just a fast, dangerous place sometimes.
“That night, I just hit the ruts wrong and got up basically off the track, onto the flat,” he continued. “They didn’t have it watered because it was mid-summer, so it was basically pure dust there … almost like sand. But I got up on the flat and was sliding hard and I knew with my momentum I was going to run off into the abyss over where people pull into the track with their rigs. That spot has a huge downhill run, and at the time they had a set of concrete barriers that I completely destroyed the top of. But I went through those and then flipped all the way down the hill.
“Looking back, the concrete barriers were what hurt me, not flipping down the hill.”
As Thomas’ destroyed race car came to a stop, he recounts that he never completely blacked out as safety workers tended to him, though his memory of the immediate aftermath is slightly fuzzy.
“By the time people got to me … I remember just flashes, but they got to me and they were asking if I was OK and I know I wasn’t saying a word,” Thomas noted. “My dad got to me and I just closed my eyes and that’s what I do when I’m hurt … but they freaked out saying I blacked out or whatever, which technically I suppose I was, but I would breathe in and open my eyes back up. I was just in pain; people have told me I was screaming and crying without saying a word, basically.
“But they wanted to LifeFlight me out … so they put me on a board and sent me away, took me to Ohio Health and started doing scans on me to figure out what all was wrong.”
Doctors quickly diagnosed Thomas with a severe concussion from the accident, but they didn’t find any traces of internal bleeding or any other immediate issues of concern.
“That’s good, right? They didn’t see anything major that was wrong, so they released me and I went home,” Thomas said.
He admits that from the look of the crash he probably shouldn’t have walked away, but he did.
It was after that when things took a turn for the worse.
“I didn’t race for a couple of weeks and I remember being in my room one day after I got home, maybe a couple weeks after the crash … and my mom called me into the living room,” Thomas said. “I thought I was in trouble or something … but she just had this ghostly blank look on her face.
“She sat me down … and I just thought someone died or something, or someone was hurt, but she started reading off this letter that talked about my stay at the hospital,” Thomas continued. “It went on to a paragraph that stated on the last scan that they found a mass on my right kidney that they believed was kidney cancer.
“Sure enough, it ended up being renal cell carcinoma.”
In an instant, Thomas went from being a teenage sprint car driver recovering from a crash that could have killed him to a teenage sprint car driver with cancer that could kill him all the same.
“There are not a lot of words to describe how you’re supposed to feel at that point,” Thomas admitted. “But I knew I wanted to get better; I just wanted to know what we had to do. So we scheduled an appointment with one of the best cancer doctors in the country out of Indiana; his name is Dr. (Jason) Sprunger, and he was pretty quick to tell me that I needed surgery.
“Essentially, what he ended up doing was controlling a robot to make the incisions and then they went inside me with the robot — almost like a video game — and cut out the tumor.”
Sounds simple, right? It wasn’t, Thomas affirmed.
“It sounds kind of scary because it was,” he said. “I woke up after that and it was probably the worst pain I’ve ever been in my life … waking up to even just 10 percent of my kidney being gone.”
But the cancer was gone and that was a blessing and a relief.
“I can’t explain how much weight was lifted after the surgery,” he admitted. “You go from, as a kid, just living your life and racing and doing what I was doing … to wondering if any of that is still going to be there in an instant.”
As rare as Thomas’ situation seems just in telling the story, he adds that it was made even rarer by the fact that his cancer case happened to be the least common of the three forms or renal cell carcinoma — chromophobe renal cell carcinoma — which only makes up about five percent of RCC cases worldwide.
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