In the book of Scott Bloomquist’s life that will someday be published, the page count could reach epic levels with all the wild, weird and wonderful episodes that Dirt Late Model racing’s Most Interesting (and Controversial) Man has to recount.

The pipeline of stories doesn’t seem to be slowing down either. Even though the 60-year-old GOAT from Mooresburg, Tenn., has been through a series of stops-and-starts to his racing career since a March 2019 motorcycle accident and hasn’t won a feature since September 2020, he still manages to make news in unexpected ways.

RELATED: Scott Bloomquist Hospitalized: Here's What We Know

Take, for instance, what Bloomquist went through during the month of June. There was, of course, the wicked, flipping crash he experienced on June 8 during a heat race for Dream XXX at Eldora Speedway of Rossburg, Ohio — one of his worst wrecks of more than four decades in the sport and certainly his biggest at the famed half-mile oval where he’s enjoyed so much success — but also the off-track incident just days later that led to him being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

Bloomquist still shakes his head in disbelief over what happened to him at his shop late on the evening of June 11. A terrible allergic reaction to an insect bite? Yeah, he never had that as a possibility on the bingo card of his life.

“That was just a really bizarre experience,” Bloomquist said, recalling the health scare while sitting on his hauler’s couch in a pair of shorts after showering following his early departure from Sunday’s 40-lap Schaeffer’s Southern Nationals feature at Volunteer Speedway in Bulls Gap, Tenn. “Especially right after the accident.”

Leaning forward, Bloomquist peeled off a Band-Aid from the lower portion of his right leg to reveal a small mark in his skin. 

“See that right there?” he said to a visitor while pointing at the blemish. “There’s a bump, I can feel it right here. That’s where I got bit.”

Bloomquist was outside his shop washing his transporter late June 11 when his ordeal began. As he worked in shorts, he realized that a huge horsefly had attached itself to his right leg.

“Because I got some tingling and numbness down here (resulting from the injuries he suffered in his motorcycle crash), I didn’t feel anything,” Bloomquist said. “I was barefoot and I happened to notice I was leaving tracks of blood. I looked down and I was like, ‘What the hell?’ There was a big horsefly on my leg, and he’d obviously been there for a while. I mean, there’s blood just pouring down my leg. He hit a main artery, and he was just down there going to town on it I guess.

“I look down and I see it, and I take the hose and I blast him off, and I just went right back to washing. I didn’t even worry about covering it even though it was still bleeding.”

It should be noted here that, when Bloomquist discussed this affair last month, he initially suggested that it was a wasp sting that caused his ensuing allergic reaction. He had no idea that a horsefly bite could cause serious problems.

“Let me tell ya, I was too embarrassed to say the exact truth, because I didn’t understand it,” Bloomquist admitted. “I thought, Man, people are gonna think this (a hospital trip due to a horsefly bite) is ridiculous. I’ve never been allergic to anything in my life, so I said it was a wasp because people are allergic to them. Until I got with the doctors and said, ‘Are people allergic to horseflies?’ They said yes, and a that’s a whole different thing.”

VIDEO: Road to Eldora: Planet Zero

Horseflies can pack a wallop, and Bloomquist was, in fact, the perfect mark for one to attack. The strong, sharp mouthparts on a female horsefly — only females bite land mammals because they have to obtain protein from blood to produce eggs — work like scissors as they cut through the skin, which means horsefly bites are painful and typically prompt humans to swat them away. But the tingling sensation in Bloomquist’s leg meant he didn’t react to the bite, allowing the horsefly to suck away for a lengthy period of time while releasing a protein that slows blood clotting.

It’s this anti-clotting protein that can cause an allergic reaction in some people. Bloomquist apparently fell into this small category.

“I’ve been around horses and cows (usual targets of horseflies) and I might’ve had one get on me before, but you feel it right away and you hit ‘em away,” Bloomquist said. “But (this one had) been down there long enough and was leaving a blood trail.

“Less than 10 minutes (after flicking away the horsefly), I started breaking out with a rash. It started all through here (abdomen), and actually I started really itching. I’m sitting there going, ‘God, damn, what in hell have I got into?’ I never really thought that could have anything to do with it.

“Then finally, I thought, I feel funny, and I felt the rash coming and my face was getting hot, so I went in and got a cold shower and rinsed off and washed up. I came out and Carla, my girlfriend, was in the shop, and another guy was in there, and I went and said, ‘Hey you guys, come here. I don’t feel right. I don’t really know what’s going on, but I got bit by a horsefly …

“After I got out of the shower, I was broke out all around my neck, and my face was bright red,” he continued. “Then I started getting lightheaded, and I’m thinking again, ‘What in the hell?’”

Bloomquist’s girlfriend retrieved a blood-pressure tester in the shop and put it on his arm.

“She checked mine and it wouldn’t register,” Bloomquist said. “She checked her’s and it was fine and the other person’s checked fine, and she checked mine again and it wouldn’t register. I said, ‘Ah, the battery must be going, get a new battery for it.’ So she comes back with a new battery and mine wouldn’t show again. 

“Well, then I stood up and I went down to on my knees. I got dizzy and she kind of caught me, and she said, ‘I’m calling the ambulance.’ I’m like, ‘No, don’t call no ambulance. I don’t need no ambulance.’ Well, good thing she didn’t listen, because when (the rescue squad) showed up and checked my blood pressure, it was like 50-something over 40-something, and they said they couldn’t even believe I was coherent, which I wasn’t real good coherent, but I remember them showing up.

“Then I don’t remember anything after that,” he added. “They loaded me up and took me to the hospital.”

Bloomquist was immediately admitted to Tennessee’s Morristown-Hamblen Healthcare System for treatment.

“When I got in there, they just put me on an IV and flooded my system with whatever the hell it was, so much so that I was so bloated,” Bloomquist said. “You couldn’t even seen any veins, nothing in my hand. I just looked like I was swollen.

“I went in that night, and they kept me two more nights. I said, ‘I feel fine, I’m good, I’m ready to get out of here,’ but they kept me.”

Bloomquist was released after his blood pressure stabilized, the rash subsided and he “started feeling normal again.” But while he was recovering in the hospital, he underwent other tests when he told doctors he “had a little headache” and revealed that he had recently been involved in not only his bad crash at Eldora but also absorbed a hard, head-on hit from another car in a May 3 accident at Ultimate Motorsports Park in Elkin, N.C.

“After the (Eldora) accident, they checked me out (at the track) and I never went to the hospital or doctor,” said Bloomquist, who suffered a cut on his left hand and wrist that was bandaged by personnel in Eldora’s infield care center. “But while I was in for this (allergic reaction), I told ‘em about the accident, and they decided to go ahead and (CT) scan my head and neck and all that stuff.

“They said I was fine, but I don’t ever have migraines, and I’d had pretty bad headaches for about three or four days, and my neck was really sore. I’ve had a couple headaches since then, but I don’t know what that was connected to.”

Bloomquist remarked that, after his back-to-back, car-destroying crashes, he was worried about another round of misfortune befalling him because “s--- comes in threes.” It would seem that his horsefly bite qualifies for his hat trick of bad things.

I would consider that the third,” Bloomquist said. “Anything that puts you in the hospital. The crashes didn’t, but that did.”

Bloomquist began his attempt to put the problems behind him when he returned to the cockpit for June 28-29’s unsanctioned Volunteer 50 the high-banked Bulls Gap oval he knows so well. He was back in another Team Zero car fielded by his friend and fellow Tennessee racer Terry Wolfenbarger with no ill feelings in the wake of his wrecks.

“Stuff like that, I mean, it doesn’t affect how I feel or think about anything,” Bloomquist said. “Those accidents, it’s like just another day at the office. You just gotta get back in and go.”

Then Bloomquist paused. When he continued speaking, he pointed out the primary problem he’s facing.

“My biggest issue right now is just being able to afford to go test and get caught back up a little bit. We’re not far off,” he said. “And I don’t wanna use up Dale and Shane (McDowell) even though they’d probably help me with anything I wanted to know. I’m pretty stubborn.”

Bloomquist finished eighth in a Volunteer 50 semifeature and 21st in the $50,000-to-win finale after retiring early. He decided to make another appearance Sunday at Volunteer to get back in the flow.

“We really weren’t even planning on coming here, but I was like, ‘Well, yeah, let’s go,’ ” Bloomquist said. “We just thought we’d come back and see how we fared.

“This car here is probably 8 years old, but (Wolfenbarger) hasn’t raced a lot so it’s just been sitting. The older cars (of Bloomquist’s design) are still good cars so I wasn’t concerned about that, but we updated it, put the new front crossmember and all that stuff in it a while back. We just went over it front-to-back, took it apart.

“We probably should’ve changed the fuel filter before we raced it because when we qualified tonight it was just starving for fuel so we could’ve qualified better. But when you get a car, and by time you go through it and get to the racetrack … we wanted to go test, and maybe we could’ve worked all these bugs out, but we weren’t able to do that.”

Bloomquist had a solid run going in Sunday’s feature, holding third place for the first 13 laps. But on a restart that circuit he came together with Ricky Weiss of Headingley, Manitoba, between turns one and two, lost several positions and moments later pulled off the track for a 20th-place finish.

“As soon as we hit tires (with Weiss), I lost all power steering,” Bloomquist said. “I looked in there and the belt was still on, so that wasn’t it. It was just way too stiff.

“I was good in that feature actually. We ran lap times that probably were the second best car on the track, but you get behind those guys and it’s tough. We’re playing catchup.”

After wiping out his Team Zero car owned by his friend Devin Jones in the Ultimate Motorsports Park accident and then having Wolfenbarger’s other car “scrapped” at Eldora, Bloomquist concedes that he’s struggling just to put together the pieces needed to continue racing.

“I just don’t have equipment, that’s the thing,” Bloomquist said. “I’m just relying on friends and relationships from the past right now. Just trying to get some stuff going again. It’s just hard to do. This is as long as I’ve gone without any income. The world kind of stops.”

Bloomquist isn’t ready to throw up a white flag of surrender. He believes some changes he’s made to increase the spring pressure on his gas pedal is helping him cope with the tingling problem in his right leg, which he hopes will make him perform better in upcoming long-distance races he plans to enter.

“I want to try to go to Cedar Lake" Speedway in New Richmond, Wis., for Aug. 1-3's USA Nationals, Bloomquist said. “I might try to do the North-South (100 at Kentucky’s Florence Speedway on August. 8-10) and the Topless (100 at Arkansas’s Batesville Motor Speedway on August. 15-17). No matter what, we’ll be at the World (100 at Eldora on Sept. 5-7), though.”

But Bloomquist also is realistic about his racing schedule these days.

“Right now all the decisions aren’t all mine,” Bloomquist admitted. “And again, if I gotta pay this fuel for this rig (owned by longtime sponsor Ed Petroff), we’re not gonna be able to go. I’m not gonna get far at all.”