I got hooked straight away, and appreciating my enthusiasm, a family friend took me to race a real go-kart. I never looked back.

Out of nowhere, I discovered a natural talent and begged my parents to let me take it more seriously. They have supported me every step of the way, from when I started competing in World Karting Association (WKA) races way back in 1991.

After seeing success in carting in 1998, I moved to the 3/4-scale stock cars of the Allison Legacy Cars Series and earned five wins despite racing against competitors twice my age. My big break came when I entered the Late Model Stock racing in NASCAR’s Weekly Racing Series in 1999.

Things got serious after that and in 2001 I finished runner-up in the ProCup title chase and embarked on a four-race Xfinity Series schedule. From there, the only way was up!

Out of the Saddle…
In May 2010 I was out on a bike ride with a friend of mine. Now this friend, while in fine enough shape, by his own admission was not an athlete. Usually when we would ride, I’d pull away from him on the hills, and he’d be playing catch-up. But that day I couldn’t keep up. I was so out of breath, but I wasn’t in pain or anything, so I just figured it was an off day. Maybe a few too many beverages the night before at dinner!

The following day, I noticed that my ring and pinky finger on my left hand were turning white. Obviously I thought that was strange, but me being me, I didn’t think anything more of it. I was 26 years old, and when you’re 26, you’re invincible, right? WRONG!

A couple of days later, I was in Washington, D.C. visiting the troops at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, and I started feeling some discomfort in my chest when I breathed. As the days wore on, I started to feel little flickers of pain in my lungs every time I took a breath. It was especially bad at night, when I was sleeping…or trying to. It got so bad that I couldn’t even take a deep breath without doubling over from the pain.

And into the Emergency Room
After a day or two of this, I spoke to a close friend and trusted doctor, Dr. Jerry Petty. It took him only a few minutes into my story to tell me to go directly to the emergency room. I debated him for a little while, he stuck to his guns and then I went to a lunch meeting in George Town. What an idiot! Finally, at lunch, it got to the point where I could barely breathe, and I had no choice but to go to the emergency room.

When I arrived at the hospital the doctors knew I was bad, but thought that I had pneumonia; so they gave me antibiotics. They also took a CT scan to get a better look at my lungs. When a doctor came back in with the results, he held the image up in front of me and pointed to a bunch of small black dots on my lungs. It wasn’t pneumonia, I had blood clots in my left leg and my lungs, which he added, were slowly dying thanks to a lack of blood flow.

Conversations of an Invincible Man:
“O.K., doc,” I said. “Tell me what we gotta do here because I have to be at the track on Friday for qualifying.”
“I don’t think you fully appreciate the gravity of the situation here son. There is no chance you are leaving the hospital by then,” he said.
“That’s O.K. I can miss qualifying, but I really need to be there for the race on Sunday.”
“I still don’t think you’re listening, Brian. You’re not racing this weekend.”
Then he straightened up to emphasize his next point a little more, to really drive it home.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but with your condition, Brian … you may never race again.”

Twists and Turns…
After a week in the hospital in Washington, I transferred back to North Carolina. On the flight home the clots started to proliferate and I ended up back in the ER at Charlotte Medical Center with severe pain in my lungs and trouble breathing. They put me back on an aggressive dose of anticoagulants (blood thinners) and admitted me back into the hospital.

The doctors continued to explain what putting me on anticoagulants meant for my career. Basically, it wouldn’t prevent me from racing. I could physically perform the same way I always had, but if I were to get into a bad crash that caused any kind of significant bleeding, I would just…keep bleeding.

The main concern was trauma to a major organ. If I suffered a bad head injury or primary organ damage, my blood wouldn’t be able to clot as fast and I could bleed out or in the case of a head injury it would cause a brain hemorrhage that could easily kill me.

A Dead End?
While I sat there in the hospital room trying to wrap my head around all this, the doctor and his colleagues went back to work to solve another mystery. Why were my fingers turning white as well? How had the blood clot gotten to my hand?

See, for a clot to originate in my lower leg, which mine had, and then reach my hand, it would have had to travel through my heart from one side to the other, which shouldn’t be possible unless I had a hole in my heart. They took some scans, and there it was.

A Bit of Luck… (If you can call it that!)
When the clot had passed through the hole in my heart, it could have only gone in one of two directions; down into my lower body, like my hand or up, straight to my brain. The latter would have probably killed me or at least been a stroke. And the odds were a significantly higher chance it goes to my brain.

Back behind the wheel…

After a frustrating 12 months of recovery I was taken off blood thinners and cleared to race. Red Bull, who I had been racing with before my discovery, had a car waiting for me!

I drove in every Sprint Cup Series race in 2011. Then, after the season, Red Bull shut its team down. They wanted to focus on their new soccer team in New York. It was a hard pill to swallow. I and so many others had put so much into building a really competitive team in such a short period; it was heartbreaking to see it end so quickly.

In 2012 I signed with Michael Waltrip Racing, splitting a car with Mark Martin in the Sprint Cup Series. That same year I also raced in the WEC series that year including the famed 24 Hour of Le Mans. While continuing the partnership with MWR and Mark in 2013 for 17 races in the Spring Cup Series, I also signed with Joe Gibbs Racing’s Nationwide Series team to race full time that season.

It was on July 14, 2013 that I found myself back in the NASCAR Spring Cup series victory lane at New Hampshire Speedway. For the first time since my blood clots and for the first time since I had been told that I may never race again, I stepped back into the car and won. It was personally the most important win of my career!

But the good fortune didn’t last…
Not long after the race, I was out with my wife, Sarah, rock climbing when I felt a knot in my right calf. Earlier in the season, I had suffered a foot sprain in an accident at Bristol, after which I wore a protective boot for about a month. And one of the things that can cause blood clots, I had learned, is immobility. So when I felt that knot in my calf, I knew exactly what it was.

The first thing I thought was, “They’re not going to let me back in the car….” So I considered not even going to the doctor.
I thought back to the bike ride in New York and the shortness of breath I experienced in Washington; how I had waited to go to the hospital, and how if I had waited longer, I could have died. In hindsight, that was pretty stupid.

But now, faced with the same decision, I was still contemplating not going…

It’s tough to explain. I guess when you love something as much as I love racing, and you know it could be taken away from you, you just don’t want to acknowledge it. You don’t want to face it. But I knew I had to.
So I reluctantly, but wisely, went back to CMC in Charlotte to have it checked out and I’m glad I did, too. Because unlike the first time, we caught the clot early, so it was easier to get past. I had to go back on blood thinners, and I missed the rest of the 2013 season. I was able to get back in the car for the 2014 season; my first full season in three years.

But now I had two strikes against me, and we all know what three strikes usually means.

Not now, not here…
Of all the race cars I’ve driven, all the limits I’ve pushed, all the accidents, all the injuries, and I was going to die in a freaking rental car.

It was December 2014; the Sprint Cup season had ended a couple of weeks earlier. I was home in Miami on my way to Charlotte for a photo shoot, and my back had been hurting the entire flight.

Actually, it wasn’t so much my back as it was my right side, like the lower right side of my back.  I had jumped in a rental car because I had a photo shoot to get to. But I didn’t get more than a mile from the airport before I decided there was no way I was going to make it to the shoot. The pain wasn’t so much like somebody was stabbing me with a knife, but more like there was a knife trapped inside me trying to cut its way out.

I called Dr. Downey, my doctor at the Carolinas Medical Center, and told him I was coming to the ER. He told me not to drive, that I should call an ambulance; but I didn’t listen. Mostly because I didn’t think there was time. Something was definitely wrong. I didn’t want to wait for an ambulance.

But also … c’mon, I’m a race car driver; nobody’s going to get me to the hospital faster than me.

With the headlights fading…
I sped up the circular driveway to the ER, coming in and out of consciousness, and skidded to a stop so close to the entrance that the nose of the car made the automatic doors slide open. I got out and immediately fell to the ground. With the engine still running I crawled to the front of the car, used the bumper to pull myself back to my feet and stumbled into the ER.

I was still fading in and out as the nurses rushed over and put me on a stretcher. They gave me an IV and put an oxygen mask on my face. I couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but I heard one of them say “kidney stones”.

Dr. Downey came down. He had seen me endure a lot of pain before, so he knew something like kidney stones wouldn’t have rendered me so helpless. He also ruled out a blood clot because a clot couldn’t get to my kidney without having passed through my heart first, and the hole in mine had already been permanently patched. So the doctors went back to the drawing board and started running tests.

Finally, at 3 a.m., 17 hours after I had literally pulled into the ER doorway, Dr. Downey came back in. It wasn’t kidney stones, but it was another blood clot, and it was cutting off the blood supply to my kidney. By the time they examined me, my kidney was shutting down; it was literally dying inside of me. But how in the world had I gotten a blood clot there? They had to put me under in order to do some tests to find out.

Catastrophic engine failure…
When I came round from my anesthetic and saw the doctors prepping my chest, the doctor explained what they thought was happening. He told me that something was wrong with the patch over the hole in my heart. It was either kinked or coming off or something. They wouldn’t know until they got in there. But there was also another clot, a big clot, maybe the size of a dime clinging to the patch. And if it broke off before they could get in there, it was either going to get stuck in my heart or go straight to my brain.
Either way, it would almost certainly kill me.

“Look,” the doctor said, “we’re going to have to cut you open, and cutting you open may be what breaks the clot loose. We need to be honest with you and tell you that, but we have to try to go in and get it. We have no choice.”

What do you say to that?

Into the repair shop…
It was the middle of the night. My parents weren’t in town. My wife, Sarah, had finally just gone to shower and grab clean clothes, but the doctors called her and she immediately came back.
Everything happened so quickly. I had maybe 30 minutes to spend with Sarah before the surgery. My parents were on their way, but they weren’t going to make it in time. My sister and nephews showed up right before I went in.

I kissed Sarah and told her how much I loved her, and then the doctors took me into the operating room and put me under. And with my history of waking up when I was under anesthesia, they amped the dosage up as high as they could without killing me. They made sure I was out.

I just remember that the last thing that went through my mind before I went under was that I had no idea if I was ever going to wake up.

Lessons & Gratitude…
Trust me, when you are in the middle of something bad, the last thing you want to hear from people is how it will make you stronger, even if that is true, so I added my own little twist some time ago.

The pain. The uncertainty. The recovery. The emotional toll on not only you, but also on your family and the people closest to you.

As you clearly know by now, I did wake up. That’s largely because I was fortunate enough to have some of the best doctors and surgeons available. And this time I didn’t wait, I went straight to the hospital!

The following season I was back in a car but it didn’t last long. After just two races I had to stop due to another clot. It was heart wrenching, especially after fighting through so much, yet again…

Back in the drivers seat…
A year later I recieved a call no racer ever wants, one of my competitors had broken his back. Tony Stewart, a close friend, was going to miss the start of the 2016 season and they wanted to know if I would fill in for him. Knowing what it’s like to be on the side lines I was crushed for Tony. Yet it was still an honor that he wanted me to fill in for him.

It’s been almost three years, and I haven’t raced since, yet! In that time, I’ve done some TV, including driving shows and analyst work for NBC.  It’s been fun and kept me around the sport I love. But I’ve really focused more on my life away from the track.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my family, friends, and travel. I’ve delved even further into the business world of private equity and venture capitalism. I never really discussed it much when I was racing but it was something that I always loved and focused on while racing. Never really thought it was going to be my second career at 30 though. Thanks to a few great mentors in the business world it has paid off.

And now for the rest of the story…