Justin Rosenbohm wants to defend his three consecutive National Hot Rod Association Division 3 Super Street Class titles this summer. But he can’t.
Two kidney surgeries await, and he is trying to recover from two January brain surgeries.
Rosenbohm, a LeClaire, Iowa, resident, has Von-Hippel Lindau Disease, a rare disorder in which tumors grow in the body’s organs and central nervous system.
He won’t let the disease slow him down. A brain surgery scar on the back of his neck runs down the center of his skull and limits his ability to turn his head. He is blind in his left eye because of a tumor that detached his retina. In spite of all that, he raced at Cordova Dragway last week in a street car, his 1987 Corvette, and finished runner-up in the True Street class.
“It was fun. That’s where I like to be,” Rosenbohm said. “Just to be back over there with all my friends competing again. A lot of people were glad to see me, and it’s something they probably didn’t think I could do.”
He will race at Cordova this weekend, but that likely will be it for the summer. He’s scheduled to have surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on one kidney May 14 and another on the other soon after that.
It would be easy to call Rosenbohm’s fate cruel. He recovered successfully from two January surgeries, regaining his leg strength and mobility, raced again, only to have surgeries sideline him again.
“It’s not even fair,” his father, Mark, said. “He just turned 25, so he’s not really anywhere close to being old enough to have this sort of thing happen to him. He went from the highest of highs … but then everything just went to hell.”
Justin doesn’t see things that way.
“If I wasn’t able to drive, it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said. “If I wasn’t able to do it, I could still be involved. But if you don’t have your health, you don’t have much. You should be thankful to be able to do anything like this.”
But racing has been his world since he was 15, when he took second place in the Street Class of the World Series of Drag Racing at Cordova.
He won his first Division 3 title in 2005 and won two more after that, including last year’s title win despite no vision in his left eye for most of the season.
Rosenbohm said he knew the disease might come. While it is extremely rare in most people, he had a 50-50 chance of contracting the disease because his mother had it.
She had a brain tumor when she was 25 and hasn’t had any complications since.
“That’s the goal,” Justin said. “We get rid of this stuff now … and hopefully everything’s OK.”
Rosenbohm discovered he had the disease when he was 17, after he had surgery on his right eye to remove a tumor. The disease struck last year on his left eye, but he didn’t see a doctor right away.
“He didn’t want to deal with it, because after the surgery it affected his vision a little bit, so he didn’t want to go to the doctor,” Mark said.
But scar tissue built up, blocking the drainage of fluid from his eye. It burst, detaching the retina, and he lost sight in that eye.
Justin had tests on his right eye in January, and he underwent an MRI. His doctors found tumors on his brain and kidneys, and the surgeries were scheduled to remove them.
While recovering, he keeps his reaction time sharp by using a practice tree in his basement. The tree is a replica of the light stand on drag strips that tell racers when to launch. The doctors have told Justin he could take as much as six weeks to recover from the kidney surgeries, which would put him back in the drivers seat in August, barring complications.
He can’t work at Outback Steakhouse in Davenport, where he waits tables and sometimes bartends, but his managers say his job is waiting for him when he gets better.
Justin almost is nonchalant about the disease. The surgeries will remove a percentage of both kidneys, but he focuses on the fact that he only needs a small percentage of one kidney to avoid dialysis.
The rest is spare parts.
He and his father call the disease a speed bump. It’s another opponent to beat off the line. Putting the pedal to the floor will help him outrace it.
“I don’t know what everyone is worried about, it’s just a kidney,” Justin wrote on his Web site,rosenbohmracing.com. “I mean, I just had two brain surgeries!”
The thrills he gets from winning races drive him to recover. He will push himself to return to racing shape.
“My motivation is to get healthy and get back in the car again,” Rosenbohm said. “Because that’s where I’m the happiest.”
Justin’s ordeal has inspired others. There are Internet message boards such as classracer.com filled with well wishes. His e-mail inbox is overflowing, too.
Some events have allowed drivers extra practice time if they make donations to defray some of Rosenbohm’s medical costs.
Another fellow racer, Lee Lones, has taken the charitable contributions to the next level. He designed a decal racers can put on their helmets or cars. The blue logo is a bomb with a smiley face, for Rosenbohm’s nickname, the bomb.
Lones, who races in the same class as Rosenbohm, said a friend has been selling the decals on the East Coast and has run out, raising more than $900. Justin has health insurance, but it doesn’t cover all of his medical costs.
“He’s an awesome kid, I’d do anything for him,” said Lones, a native of the Chicago suburb of Custer Park, Ill. “He kicks your butt on the track, but then he has this great smile, and how can you not like a guy like that?”
Contact Nate Bloomquist at (563) 383-2201 or e-mail nbloomquist@qctimes.com
