Racing Community Rallies Around Street Car Braggin’ Rights’ Nate Prater

Street Car Braggin’ Rights has turned into a popular drag racing event, but unfortunately, its promoter, Nate Prater, has run into some serious health issues. Prater remains in the hospital due to complications from diverticulitis and has been there for nearly a month.

Prater has earned praise as a promoter thanks to his philanthropic efforts and generosity. His Burnouts For Kids events have raised more than $100,000 for children’s hospitals. The Street Car Braggin’ Rights series is also known for how much it does for racers as well as members of the media.

On August 9, Prater shared on social media that he was back in the hospital because of his previous issues with diverticulitis. Additional complications and problems have now kept him in the hospital for nearly a month.

Prater has remained optimistic as he continues to update the racing world about his condition via social media. He recently provided an extensive update explaining his medical history and what led to his current hospital stay.

“I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what’s going on with me and why I’ve been in the hospital.

When I was around 21 years old, I was diagnosed with diverticulitis. Basically, I had pouches that formed in my intestines that would become inflamed and infected. Over the next few years, those infections landed me in the hospital several times.

After being admitted multiple times a year, my doctor recommended removing around 8 inches of my intestine.

On November 17, 2017, I had surgery at MCG (now Wellstar). A few days after surgery, I was still in an insane amount of pain and wasn’t progressing like I should have been. They did a CT scan and found out I was septic and had an ileus.

That landed me back in emergency surgery, and that’s where things got pretty bad.

I woke up with a colostomy bag, open wounds, an NG tube, and spent a long period of time in the ICU. For a while, the only way I could communicate was with a pen and paper. I spent Christmas and my birthday in the hospital.

Eventually, I was able to go home. But after only being out for a few days, I developed another really bad infection and went to the ER at University Hospital, (now Piedmont).

After running tests, the ER doctor told me, my family, and my friends that I probably wasn’t going to make it. They felt the infections inside my body were too severe to treat and that my best option was to go back to MCG. Basically to die there not here.

Then something happened that I’ll never forget. The woman who had done my CT scan happened to walk back by my room. We were all pretty visibly upset, so we told her what we had just been told.

Call it faith, pure bullshit luck, divine intervention, whatever you want. She said she was going to make a phone call.

She called the hospital’s general surgeon, Dr. Bates who came in and ultimately saved my life.

After a few months of drain tubes, procedures, and basically cleaning the infection out of my body, I finally started getting back on the right track.

Since then, I’ve dealt with several bowel obstructions because of the amount of scar tissue in and around my intestines. Most of the time I can tell when one is coming and get ahead of it. There have only been two times I couldn’t, once in Atlanta about five years ago and again a few weeks ago, which is what landed me back here.

This time, we decided to do minimally invasive robotic surgery to go in and remove as much of the scar tissue as possible. They were able to successfully remove around 70% of it.

The surgery itself went well. The problem now is that my intestines haven’t completely started working again the way they’re supposed to.

So now we wait.

Hopefully, in a few more days I can finally get out of here, and hopefully this surgery prevents a lot of these problems in the future.”

Ron Mowen, owner of Vengeance Racing, started a GoFundMe to help Prater through this difficult time. We here at Dragzine wish Nate all the best and hope to see him at Street Car Braggin’ Rights in 2027.