Rob Wendland thought he had died.

The longtime NHRA crew chief underwent surgery Jan. 25 to remove a section of his tongue because of a cancerous growth. And for a moment, he thought he hadn’t made it.

“I woke up in the recovery room, and there was nobody around. There wasn’t even a nurse around,” he said, speaking in almost hushed tones, clearly still moved by the experience. “It was an open room, and there were other people [lying] around. I swear, I thought I was dead. You’re looking around, and there’s nobody moving. It was just the craziest [feeling]. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh – I guess those prayers didn’t work.”

But the prayers had worked. That didn’t mean Wendland was left with no challenges. But he was alive.

And in this season celebrating resurrection, Wendland’s career, too, has fresh life and rejuvenating hope. He’s in Quebec this week, tutoring the crew he’ll be working with for Top Fuel racer Dan Mercier at selected races this Camping World Drag Racing Series season.

Wendland most recently was the crew chief for Top Fuel owner-driver Terry McMillen for six years, until the Amalie Oil sponsorship vanished at the end of the 2020 season. After several marketing deals that didn’t materialize, McMillen sold his cars and equipment to Canadian Dan Mercier. So Wendland will be tuning Mercier’s car, and their first scheduled race is a month from now, in mid-May, at Virginia Motorsports Park, south of Richmond.

But no one has waved a magic wand over Wendland, said “Abracadabra,” and made all the obstacles in his life disappear. Happily, he did find out that the tumors on and under his thyroid gland – discovered during a PET scan for his tongue – were benign, but his doctor performed a biopsy on those. However, the doctor didn’t share the news with him right away – instead he went on vacation until the first of the year, leaving Wendland’s imagination to run down bleak alleyways for nearly a month.

His Christmas and New Year’s holidays – a time traditionally to “be of good cheer” – were laden with pain, literally and emotionally: “I was recovering from that and waiting for a cancer diagnosis on my neck” – all while also going through a divorce and recovering from a severely broken wrist that required surgery in November.  

“It was a compression fracture. It shoved the big bone on the end of the wrist down inside. I had surgery. It severed the extensor tendon to my thumb. It fractured the bone, and [that] severed the tendon. My thumb wouldn’t pull back,” he said. “Your index finger has two tendons, so they stole one from it and then hooked it up to the thumb. You know how you can make a gun with your hand? My gun looks pretty pitiful.”

His relationships felt that way, too. He had tucked his two little children to bed every night – something sweet he loved – and he didn’t get to see them or do that every night anymore. He had even bought an RV “so we could travel together, so my family could be with me. And all that was being taken away.”

That and about 20 percent of his tongue was being taken away. (Ironically, his surgery took place almost 10 years to the day after his racing mentor, Tim Baxter of “The Jayhawker” fame, passed away Jan. 31, 2012.)

“They took off about a fifth of my tongue on one side,” Wendland said. “The recovery was horrible. It was everything they said it was going to be. I couldn’t drink water for 14 days. I had to have IVs. It was nerve that was exposed, because they don’t sew the tongue shut. It has to heal from the inside out, because it’s muscle. That nerve is connected to your ear canal, also to your jawbone.”

He said the pain has been “excruciating – the minute that anything liquid touches it. Plus, it’s swollen. At the time they were concerned that it might swell so much that I couldn’t breathe. I lost 20 pounds in 14 days. Oh my gosh, it was rough.

“But, Wendland said, “I had the best possible outcome: the depth of the invasion wasn’t that much, and I didn’t have to do radiation or chemo. I still have to do one more surgery to do reconstruction on it.” Using the traditional wall-clock to illustrate, he said “The part that they knocked off . . . like, looking at it from the front of the tongue, they took a piece off from nine o’clock to six o’clock. They took that part out. Well, that part keeps your tongue from going over on top of your molars. So now you can imagine . . . that part of the tongue is between your teeth.”

Wendland explained that the tongue “is a muscle, and it doesn’t regenerate. Muscle doesn’t come back, once it’s gone. But it’s healing up pretty good, except there’s a big chunk of scar tissue that’s hanging out, and it gets in between my teeth on one side.”

About two weeks ago, he revisited the doctor, who “shot me full of steroids. They just grab hold of your tongue with a paper towel, and they pull it out as far as they can and they take a needle [which he calculated was about the diameter of a telephone pole] – and there’s no deadening of anything – and they just shoot this stuff in. You can hear the membrane breaking. It’s craziest damn thing. It’s supposed to take some of the swelling down, but it’s not doing anything. So the next thing they had to cut off some stuff that was hanging out. That’s minor, compared to what I went through.”          

Through all of his trials, Wendland continued to One Track Solution Corp., the Brownsburg, Ind.-based business he founded in 2014 that supplies blower drive belts, cam drive belts, and clutch drive belts for Jr. Dragsters to his clients throughout North America and Australia.

But when his string of troubles started, Wendland said, “At first I was so mad. And I always go to church. But at this point I was like, “Woe is me. Why is God doing this to me?” He said acquaintances were asking him what he did make somebody mad. Wendland said rather than think that way, “I thought, ‘He’s preparing me for something bigger. I know it. I just know it.’”

In February, at Pomona, Calif. – where he attended the Lucas Oil NHRA Winternationals on a last-minute whim and hung out with former boss Antron Brown and longtime friends in the new AB Motorsports organization – Mike Ashley approached him and offered encouragement.

Ashley, who had gone through his own set of problems and turned to his faith, shared what God had shown him. Ashley said, “You might not know what it is right now, why He’s preparing you for something. But He is. And it’ll be glorious. When you realize it, you’ll be on Cloud 9. There won’t be a care in the world. You’ll know that’s why.”

Wendland told him, “I think I’ve kind of figured it out a little bit. I’ve never spoken to so many people about my religion and helped so many people through their struggles, and I’ve got 20 more struggles than they do.”

Ashley told him, “You got it.”

Wendland replied, “It’s weird, isn’t it? My struggles are nothing. I’m here. I get to see my kids. I have a beautiful home. And when I want to go racing, I’ll go racing. I’ve turned down [jobs]. Racing will be there. I don’t know what magnitude, but it’ll be there.”

It was there in the form of Funny Car Chaos at Texas Motorplex, near Dallas, recently. Chris Graves, who owns the series, is Wendland’s nephew, and he and wife Tera just welcomed a little boy named Levi a few weeks ago. So “Great-Uncle Rob” decided to go to Ennis, Texas. Once he arrived, his brother, Kevin Wendland offered him the chance to drive his front-engine nostalgia dragster, a 5.0 index car, in the event.

After all, Wendland had competed in Mike and Barb Troxel’s In-N-Out Top Alcohol Dragster and won four national events.

“I hadn’t been in a car in 22 years,” Wendland said. “Had a good time.”

While he said he has “a new outlook about spending my money and doing what I need to do,” Wendland said he’s happy to be helping Mercier, whom he described as “a stand-up guy.”

He’s completely familiar with the car Mercier will be driving at the May 13-15 Virginia Nationals. It’s the one McMillen drove.

“That car’s coming back out. There’s nothing different from 2020. It’s got all the parts and pieces,” he said. “It’s going to be exciting. I won’t have my same team. And I had the best team in 2020, unbelievable team, the best team I’ve ever had. They gelled so well, and they were together five years.”

This week in Canada, he’s starting to build a similar unit for Mercier.

Will this team open eyes at Virginia?  Who knows?

“It’s getting out there and getting acclimated,” Wendland said. “There’s no reason the car won’t haul ass. But it’s got to be put together right, of course. That’s half the battle.”

He knows how to battle. He knows how to overcome.

And like his tongue, Wendland is healing from the inside out.