Nelson Thomas Says 'I Blame Myself for Everything' After Car Accident That Led to Foot Amputation (Exclusive) (2024)

Last March, Nelson Thomas woke up to the sight of his car burning as he got dragged out.

“When I woke up and I hit that pillar, I thought I was in hell,” the 35-year-old star of The Challenge tells PEOPLE. “All I saw was flames and fire around me. It's such a vivid memory in my head, me getting pulled out of that burning car. I go to sleep and sometimes I'll wake up screaming, thinking I'm in that car.”

The next time he woke up, Thomas found himself in the hospital.

"Being in the hospital was the most painful thing ever," he recalls. “I was shivering, I was shaking, I was sweating. My mom had to change my sheets at least 10 times throughout the night because of how much I was sweating.”

Thomas remembers seeing “the pain in her eyes” as his mother attended to him in the hospital. “She would hear me cry at night, and I know that was making her cry,” he says.

As the days went on, the reality star didn’t know if he’d ever walk again.

“When I woke up in the hospital after my car accident, I said, ‘Mom, if I can't walk again, I don't want to be here. If they got to cut my foot off, I don't want to be here,’” Thomas reveals. “I wouldn't even let people say the word ‘amputation’ around me. I didn't even want to think about that.”

Thomas spent months in and out of the hospital and ended up with three plates and 22 screws in his foot following six surgeries. He traveled from California to Mexico to New York, trying stem cell therapy, electrical stimulation and traditional physical therapy. He beat the odds, starting to walk again at three months after being told it would take six.

By October, the MTV vet returned to the gym and started swimming again, but Thomas still found himself in pain come October. At that point, Thomas’s doctor informed him that he had a nonunion bone, which meant it wasn’t healing.

The news broke him. Nelson had pain pills prescribed to him throughout his recovery and turned to them when he came home from learning that his months of dedicated work didn’t pay off.

“I closed my door, locked myself into a room and just was crying and screaming into my pillow and asking, ‘God, why me? What did I do to deserve this?’” Nelson shares. “You just start thinking about all the mistakes you've made in life and thinking that God is punishing you. All those demons that you put behind your head and you feel like you buried come alive.”

That same month, it came out that Thomas was charged with driving while intoxicated in the near-fatal March accident.

“When that article dropped in October, I broke again,” Thomas recalls. “It was the worst time of my life. What sucked the most is that what I had to deal with is that, ‘Nelson, you caused this to yourself. He blessed you with this opportunity, and you slammed the door in your own face.’ Do you know how many times I got to look at myself in the mirror and I blame myself for everything?”

Negative social media comments only worsened Thomas’s mental state at the time.

“People came for my throat,” he says. “I made the biggest mistake in my life. I own it. But they didn't even give me the chance to process it. All these articles came at me when I was in the hospital. Nobody cared.”

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Thomas — who says he’s only had one drink since his accident, on his birthday — recognized he needed therapy after dealing with this situation. He admits to previously being “scared” of therapy, but says, “I've realized the more you try to bury it, it's going to come out one day and it's going to ruin you.”

Two weeks ago, Thomas made another big decision about his health. He came to terms with the word “amputation” and told his doctors he wanted to remove his right foot.

“I'm at peace with it,” says Thomas, who'd been using an iWALK crutch to get around. “I've prayed about it. I've wrote in my journal, I've read books. I've done all my research that I can do. I've done everything I can to try to save my foot. There's a lot of people out there, even friends, they're calling me: ‘Nelson, you have a chance to keep your foot and look normal and walk around.’ But then you have to ask yourself, ‘What kind of quality of life do I want to live?’ “

Thomas weighed having an ankle orTibio-talo-calcaneal (TTC) fusion that “is going to leave me with no mobility in my ankle,” he says. “I could be in and out the hospital for the next year, and I could be in pain for the rest of my life.”

He spoke to people who previously had ankle fusions, and didn’t like what he heard. “Everyone I've talked to had nothing but negative things to say about it,” Thomas says. “They told me, ‘Nelson, if I was brave enough back then to do an amputation and cut it off, I would've done it a long time ago.’ "

After doing more research, Thomas made the choice to amputate.

“I said, ‘Mom, I'm ready to move forward with my life. I'm ready for a new chapter,’” the Are You the One? alum says. “I think He's given me all the signs to get an amputation and join the world of amputees."

Thomas will undergo surgery on March 5, the one-year anniversary of his accident. “I want to own that day,” he says. “I want to make it my day.”

But that doesn’t mean he always feels 100 percent certain about his decision. “I wake up every morning looking at my foot thinking, ‘Can you really go through with this?" Thomas confesses. “Sometimes I'm like, ‘Yes.’ Sometimes I'm like, ‘No.’ I have my ups and downs.”

Ultimately, Thomas sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

“Everybody always tells people, ‘the light at the end of the tunnel,’ but nobody tells you how long the tunnel is. They don't tell you how dark it is or how hard it is,” he says. “But I want to bring people in and show you, don't be ashamed because you're shedding tears. Crying is good. It's helped me a lot. I don't have all the answers for you right now, but I'm not hiding anything from nobody. This is who I am.”