By Jonah Bronstein
CNHI News Service

Grand Island, N.Y.— Perhaps no Grand Islander enjoyed ringing in the New Year more than Tim Phillips.
Less than a year ago, Phillips, 45, wasn’t exactly sure he would make it to 2006. In March, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The news came just as Phillips was readying for his sixth season of sprint car racing. It was to be the first time in his career that Phillips would be racing a brand-new car, but his health problems forced him to sit out the 2005 campaign.

“It was at a time when everything in life couldn’t be going better,” Phillips said this week. “I had two beautiful children. My wife and I had just bought a house a year-and-a-half earlier. It was quite a blow.”
Because Phillips was relatively young for a cancer patient, radiation treatment was not an option. He was going to have to have his prostate surgically removed.
“I was very scared,” he said. “This was my first surgery for any reason.”

Phillips underwent a robotic prostatectomy at the Henry Ford Center in Detroit in July. Initially, Phillips’ insurance company denied his request to have the surgery performed at the Ford Center by Dr. Mani Menon, who developed robotic prostatectomy and has performed more than 1,700 operations. The insurance company wanted Phillips to have the operation at Roswell Cancer Institute, which had done less than 100 robotic prostatectomy surgeries.

After a month-long hearing, Phillips was ultimately allowed to have the surgery performed by Menon. He had a six-armed, one-inch surgical robot inserted into his stomach at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday and was discharged from the hospital at 6 p.m. the following day.
Phillips says it took less than a month for him to feel totally recovered. He was happy to be alive and healthy, but there was something missing.

“Racing is very important to him,” his wife, Pam, said. “It’s something he loves to do. ... He came back and helped with the team last year, but numerous times he said it was killing him not to be out there.” Phillips’ plan was to return to racing at the Hangover 150 on Jan. 1. But he ended up being a surprise fill-in at the Canadian Sprint Car Nationals on Sept. 17. “It felt really good,” he said. “Even though I was unfamiliar with the car.”

He stresses that he could not have returned to the sport he loves without the support from his family, local churches and sponsors. Phillips, the third-generation owner of Tim Phillips Garage Inc. on Baseline Road, is currently familiarizing himself with the car he will be driving May 7, when the Southern Ontario Sprints 2006 campaign opens. He said he enters this season with a little more respect for safety, evidenced by his car’s newest editions — an encapsulated race seat and a Hans device that protects against neck stem fractures, the most common cause of racing-related deaths.

“After you’ve gone through what I’ve gone through, you kind of have a new appreciation for how short life can be,” he said. “Life can be so short, and can be taken away at any time.”