Nate Hicks doesn’t shy away from having one arm. In fact, he embraces it. The only left arm he has is on car-number graphic adorning the B-hobby/thunder car he races at his hometown’s Mountain View Raceway in Spring City, Tennessee.
“I don’t let [not having a left arm] stop me,” said Hicks, a 28-year-old iron worker and foreman of a crew of welders. “I still do everything I want to do.”
The loss of Hicks’s arm resulted from a motorcycle accident when he was 18, just nine days after his high school graduation. He suffered a brachial plexus injury, where the nerves to his left arm were torn away from his spinal cord. This paralyzed his left arm.
Without feeling in the arm, he often hurt it without realizing the severity of the injury.
Welding splatter created third-degree burns. The sling for his left arm rubbed between his thumb and index finger to the point it created a hole down to his bone. Poor circulation in the arm prevented healing. Hicks ran the risk of developing gangrene. Three years after the accident, doctors amputated the limb.
Nate Hicks still enjoys riding motorcycles, albeit with a few modifications for use with his one arm. He flipped the clutch to the right side of his crotch rocket. The cruiser he has is fully automatic.
As far as his race car, after Hicks broke his manual transmission, he now races with an automatic, lessening the disadvantage of not shifting on restarts. Hicks said when the car gets squirrely, he doesn’t have an extra hand to help control the car. Other than that, his biggest challenge comes in the shop.
“For instance, if it takes two wrenches to take a bolt off, I got to figure out a way to get the wrench to stay up there,” Hicks said. “[That could mean I] hold [the wrench] with my leg or put zip ties on it, pulling the zip ties with my teeth because I don’t have the other hand to pull.”
This year is Hicks’s rookie season. He has enjoyed racing since he was a kid. He hopes he and his car serves as an inspiration for others.
“The suicide rate for the injury I went through is very high,” said Hicks. “There was a man who wrecked on the same day [as me]. We had similar injuries; except he lost his arm in the wreck. All of our doctor visits were at the same time. We became really close.
“The hardest part is when they unwrap [the area where the limb was amputated] and you see it for the first time. That is when the brain recognizes what happened. When they unwrapped his, he didn’t show up [for appointments after]. I come to find out the guy went home and killed himself.
“I’d love to do more to help others with similar circumstances.”
Nate Hicks has made it a point to help others to deal with a new world after a life-changing trauma.
“I stopped by the physical therapy rehab [center one day] to see them, because I was there for seven weeks,” Hicks said. “I became close to a lot of the amazing staff there that took care of me. There was an older gentleman in there that had a stroke and his whole left side was paralyzed. He had given up. He didn’t want to do treatment. One of the nurses pulled me to the side and said, ‘Hey, would you talk with him?’
“I talked with him for an hour or two. The guy called me once a month afterwards, for a year. He ended up working with the physical therapist, gaining his movement back, and getting back to his life. I would love to do more stuff like that.”
The Outside Groove Executive Editor has covered motorsports since 2000. His many awards include the 2019 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Jim Hunter Writer of the Year and the 2013 Russ Catlin Award for Excellence in Motorsports Journalism.
