ESCONDIDO -- An Escondido teen was recovering at home Monday after a unique series of operations on his heart.

Doctors at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego said Brian D'Or, 16, was the first in the country to have an artificial heart pump removed and a heart valve reopened and replaced.

Brian was an avid off-road motorcyclist before his first operation last summer. He had to give up his favorite sport because he was taking medication that thins the blood to prevent clots, but adjusted to driving four-wheel off-road vehicles instead.

"This is what he got from us when they told him he couldn't ride motorcycles anymore," his mother Deanne Moore said, looking at the bright red Yamaha buggy in the family's garage.

Brian, whose parents own an off-road vehicle business in San Marcos, said he has broken his collarbone and wrist twice each motorcycling.

He didn't avoid physical activity during his recovery. He said he worked with his best friend driving a tractor and occasionally wielded a shovel. Wherever he went, he had to make sure to have a box of batteries for his heart pump and to plug the pump into the wall every night.

He returned home from the hospital Thursday after the pump's removal on March 13. This past weekend, he said he felt good enough to go fishing with friends at Lake Wohlford.

Brian is home-schooled now but is planning to attend Palomar College, his mother said.

Brian had the heart pump implanted last June after doctors discovered a tear in his aorta, the main artery bringing blood to the body.

"My chest was hurting real bad," he said of the months before getting the implant. "And it seemed like it had gotten easier to make it hurt."

The tear meant that blood was leaking from his heart and the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle were blocked. His doctors had not originally planned to do the implant, but after they put in a new aortic valve made of metal, his heart wasn't strong enough to resume its duties.

"His heart was so weak that it couldn't sustain enough blood pressure," said Walter Dembitsky, director of cardiac surgery at Sharp, in a phone interview.

The pump he and his colleagues installed doesn't pulse like other heart pumps. Rather, it's a small turbine that pulls blood continuously out of the heart's left ventricle and into the aorta.

Dembitsky said the continuous pumps last several years longer than pulsing pumps because they are simpler and have fewer moving parts.

"It just shows how far we've come since Barney Clark," he said, adding that his hospital was participating in a registry of heart pumps run by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Clark was the first person to receive an artificial heart, in 1982.

Usually when doctors implant a heart pump, they anticipate that the patient will need a transplant later or will have to live with it the rest of his life, Dembitsky said. Only in relatively few cases is the pump removed.

He estimated that 30 or 40 people worldwide had the continuous type of pump, made by Pleasanton-based Thoratec, removed. But Brian had the additional complication of needing the replacement of the aortic valve, which surgeons had sealed off when the pump was installed to prevent blood clots.

Dembitsky said that while the pump was working in Brian's body, the left side of the heart was not completely inactive. The pump's assistance meant his heart muscle could recover.

Before removing the pump, the Sharp doctors "turned it down" in a test a week beforehand.

"It's interesting when your doctors are telling you that they are doing something they haven't done before," Brian said wryly.

Brian's mother is still looking for an explanation for his heart trouble, which she said could have come from a congenital defect. Dembitsky said the original reason for Brian's tear of the aorta was unclear.

"It's very unusual to have this kind of injury to the heart at his age," he said.

On the Web: Search for "rematch" at www.nhlbi.nih.gov/

Contact staff writer Quinn Eastman at (760) 740-5412 or qeastman@nctimes.com. Comment at nctimes.com.