COLORADO, USA — An Ohio man was having surgery in Colorado when he died on the operating table. Twenty minutes later, Todd Brainard was brought back to life. 9NEWS shared the story last summer when Brainard finally went home from the hospital .
Now, he’s back for his one-year checkup, and he’s meeting the doctor and team who gave him a second chance at life. Brainard, his wife, and their two kids were vacationing in Colorado in July 2023 when Brainard was bucked off a horse. The accident shattered his pelvis, requiring emergency surgery at Denver Health .
On July 4, 2023, as doctors were wrapping up his surgery, Brainard went into cardiac arrest. "I woke up from my first surgery to see two doctors doing CPR on me,” said Brainard. Twenty minutes later, Brainard’s heart started beating again.
“The doctors, nurses, and everybody else at Denver Health worked so hard to put me in a position that I can have a normal life again that I wasn’t going to let them down and I wasn’t going to let my family down either,” said Brainard. Brainard spent the last year focusing on getting better. “[My kids] would leave for school and I would sneak out the house in my wheelchair and race down the road,” said Brainard.
A year after he almost lost his life, Brainard is back in Denver for a follow-up visit, and to meet the people who brought him back to life. “A lot of emotions are going on right now,” said Brainard. “Last year at this time I was in a wheelchair.
Now I’.