It’s a crazy world that we live in — it’s true. But many of us manage, perhaps by fluke, to make it through our daily lives reasonably unscathed. Some days, though, in some ways, people — like Brian Eckenstein — nearly experience death, in the most random of incidents.

Story by Jackelyn Gill
Photos by Lee Mann Photography

Brian Eckenstein was bandaging a horse — Anniversary Lady — the moment he nearly died.

As the mare struggled away from him, Brian experienced a sudden pain from his jaw straight down to the bottom of his toes. It knocked his breath away as he fell to the barn floor.

That fall was just the beginning — the horseman suffered servere internal bleeding and spent 11 hours on the operating table, surrounded by a medical team who broke his ribs, opened his chest and pumped 15 pints of blood through his veins. Afterwards, Brian had to rebuild his memory, and re-learn how to eat, talk, and walk.

Today, just five months later, he’s back at the racetrack. Though he’s still in the recovery process, and will be for some time, Brian and his family speak openly and optimistically about his injury, his recovery and his return to the racing industry. “You have a good year and you die,” he jokes. Brian is talking about 2009, the year he, his wife Debbie, and his daughter brought in close to $67,000 with winning horses like El Miss Aces. It was their most successful career year.

Brian, a father of three, started training seriously in his teenage years. He acquired his first horse from his uncle and trained with his brother on his family’s farm in Hickson, Ontario, which later led to jobs with established trainers such as Ken Morrison and Nelson White. By age 30, Brian had taken a job with Emco Corporation, where he went on to work for 20 years. But his most treasured successes came after his job with the company ended and he could spend more time at the stables. Before then, he was juggling horses and his work, says Debbie. “He’d do a full-time job and he’d go down to the barn. He wouldn’t get home until 11 at night, and he’d get up at six in the morning,” she says. “It was really hard for him to achieve what he wanted to achieve.”

“We had a lot of bad luck when I was doing both, ‘cause I wasn’t there,” agrees Brian. “You gotta be there to let them out and see what they’re doing.”
And there were other ventures keeping the family busy, too. At the same time, they were breeding, raising and showing chihuahuas, a side venture they’d been pursuing for over a decade.

Throughout those twenty years, they made barely $10,000 racing horses. But when Brian finally had the chance to focus on what he loved, things turned around. He hired his teenage daughter Brianna as a groom, and the whole family became involved. “Until then, she wasn’t involved with the horses at all,” says Debbie. “She was showing dogs at the dog shows and then she went to the races with us and thought she kinda liked that. She really started doing it — she started training horses, she started doing everything. But it was like it was meant to be, because when Brian took so sick, she was able to take over for him and continue on.”

It was around noon on February 10 of this year when Brian was working with Anniversary Lady, a horse stabled with Art Jones. He was trying to wrap her legs before an afternoon race, but the mare refused to cooperate. “She’s kind of light with her back feet and she wouldn’t stand still,” he says. “I was fighting with her to get her bandages on.

“And then... I don’t know what happened. A pain went from my jaw right down to my bottom of my toes. I couldn’t catch my breath.”

His aorta — the body’s main artery — had torn, and was shooting blood into his chest.

Jones found Brian on the ground and helped him get up.“I got up to the house,” Brian remembers. “I finally got my breath and I was alright. I was in no pain.”
Debbie took Brian to St. Mary’s hospital immediately, where he began experiencing more unusual symptoms. “I started burping,” he says. “I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t lay down or stand up. I couldn’t bend over. I had to keep moving around and I was burping all the time.”

After two hours of waiting, unsure whether the pains were a result of a common acid reflux or potentially a sign of the heart problems that are known to run in his family, Brian was sent by ambulance to Stratford General Hospital for an MRI.

It was at Stratford that Debbie received word that Brian had, in fact, torn his aorta — a full eight hours after the tear happened. “I heard the tech say, ‘I gotta do another set of tests, more x-rays. Bring the doctor in. We need to check this right away.’ I thought, uh-oh, something’s wrong,” she recalls. “Then they came out and told me he needed immediate surgery or he would die.”

For the second time that night, Brian was strapped down and wheeled into an ambulance, but this time he was rushed through blinding snow to University Hospital in London, Ontario, for emergency open-heart surgery. “The first surgery, he had 0.01 per cent chance of surviving,” says Brianna, who arrived at the hospital in London around 9 p.m. that night. “Obviously you have the thought in the back of your head that he’s not going to make it with odds like that.”

And few people with that injury do survive, says Debbie. She remembers Brian’s doctor telling her that the operation doesn’t happen very often because most patients don’t make it to the operating room.

But Brian did. He spent 11 hours on the table, in a medically-induced coma, with his ribs broken and chest spread wide open. Pints and pints of blood flowed into his veins to keep him alive throughout the surgery. Afterwards, he was kept in the operating room until his bleeding slowed. He spent another 24 hours in intensive care until the doctors were ready to wire his rib back together and stitch him closed again. In the end, Debbie remembers, it took 15 pints of blood to keep him alive, and he was kept in a coma for eight days.

All along, Brian had unrelenting support from his family. “We lived at the hospital for at least a week,” said Debbie. “They finally came to me and said, you gotta go home because when he wakes up he’s gonna need you more than he needs you now.”

But that wasn’t all they did. “While I was in the hospital, these guys were keeping the horses going,” grins Brian. “They did something most would never do.”

“The one thing he said to mom before the surgery,” Brianna recalls, “is, ‘make sure you get Ella ready for the stake races.’ He was still in a coma when the stake payments were due. So its a good thing he told us that.”

Brian returned home at the beginning of March. During his stay at University Hospital, he had to re-learn basic, everyday tasks like eating and walking. His memory was slowly coming back to him. But after his release, it wasn’t long before he returned to the track.

By the end of May, Brian was ready to get back in, full-time — with a little help, of course.

Although he still can’t manage the manual labour, Brian can still jog and train the horses with his family. He does, though still struggle through some effects of the healing process, which he says will take about a year. “I’m always tired,” he admits. “I can do so much and then I’ll have to go have a sleep.”

With six horses ready to go in 2010 — El Miss Aces, Ingot of Desire, Makes Me Wonder, TJ Joules and What’s Up Doc, and Anniversary Lady with Art Jones — Brian is less concerned about sleeping, though, and more interested in looking forward to reclaiming a bit of the success he experienced in 2009. “I wanna win stakes races,” he grins. Brian’s lucky enough to have received a little help from his friends — and he stresses how much he appreciates the support he’s received since his return. “Anybody would warm up the horses for me,” shrugs Brian. “They were surprised that I was back so fast, but some people recover faster than others, I guess.”

“Lots of people say to me that they never really believed in God before,” he grins, “but they sure do now!”

Pick up this issue of Trot to find out more about Brian's extremely rare heart condition.