Harry was gone, although I didn’t find out for almost three weeks. When we came down over the double oxer, Harry’s long pastern—the largest of the three bones between his hoof and his foreleg—shattered into nine pieces. His scapula, sternum, and pelvis were broken as well, but it was the pastern that clinched it. There was nothing to be done with those nine bits of bone, so they shot him where he lay.
I was even more broken than Harry, but they didn’t shoot me. I was airlifted to the Sonoma Valley Trauma Center, where it was discovered that my neck was broken. Also my collarbone, left arm, eight ribs, nose, and jaw; but it was the neck that really counted.
Because of large doses of methylprednisolone, I floated in and out of euphoria for two weeks, blissfully unaware of the fact that I could no longer move any part of my body. When I finally fought my way to the surface, I was assaulted with questions: What’s your name? Where do you live? Can you tell me what year it is? And I was tired—so very tired—and wondered why people were bothering me with questions that seemed so obvious, and also why the answers remained inexplicably beyond my grasp.
Can you wiggle your toes, can you squeeze my hand, can you feel this, they continued, and of course, I could not. My body felt like a sack of sand with a head attached—I had lost all knowledge of my limbs, that sense of knowing where your pieces are even when you’re not moving them. The awareness of pressure from clothes, a whoosh of air across bared skin, a sudden reminder from your finger that it’s still attached. All that was gone. There was nothing, there was deadness. It was as if someone had lopped my head off and put it on a plate, and somehow attached the necessary mechanics to keep it alive. And of course, once I became aware of this, I wished they hadn’t bothered.
Some time later, through the haze of morphine that was necessary because my face had just been reconstructed, I heard my father speaking with a doctor.
“Will she ever ride again?” he asked.
His voice was muffled, and I had to strain to hear above the equipment that surrounded me: the hiss and release of the ventilator, the machine that chirped in time with my heart, the blood-pressure cuff that wheezed to life at regular intervals.
I think they were behind a curtain, but they could have been at my feet. I don’t know, because my head was screwed into a halo, and I couldn’t turn to look. The doctor took so long to respond I was afraid I’d missed his answer, but there wasn’t a thing I could do to make it easier for his voice to reach me—I couldn’t cup a hand behind my ear, I couldn’t watch his lips. I couldn’t even hold my breath to make it quieter.
When he finally spoke, his words were drawn out and raspy. “Well, it would be premature to make a projection on how much function she’s likely to regain,” he said. “Our first goal is to get her breathing on her own.”
Pappa mumbled something desperate, and then the blood-pressure cuff began to inflate. Over its steady inhalation, the phrases “world-class athlete,” “Grand Prix rider,” and “Olympic contender” floated around like birds; Pappa, agitated, speaking as though he was sure the doctor was holding back. Negotiating, wheedling, and bullying, as though the doctor would do more if he could only be made to understand how important it was that I get back on a horse.
Again, a pause, and the cuff began its jerky deflation. More fragments of conversation: “spinal shock,” “vibratory sense,” and “central cord syndrome.” And then the cuff fell silent and against the relative quiet of the respirator, I heard my injury explained to my father: how my neck had been broken at the C2 and C3 vertebrae, which usually resulted in catastrophic injury; how extremely fortunate it was that everyone had followed the correct protocol at the scene and immobilized my spine; that the steroid injection I’d been given aboard the LifeFlight would also work in my favor; and finally, that it was possible—and there were no guarantees here, it was important to remember that—but it was possible that when the swelling of the soft tissues went down, I might recover some movement.
As I slipped back into my opium dreams, those words echoed endlessly through my head, only unlike an echo, they refused to fade: might recover some movement, might recover some movement, might recover some movement.
If I could have willed the ventilator plug out of the wall, I would have done it.
Flash forward now. Skip over the nine weeks in ICU and the hell that was mine when I heard that Harry was dead. Past the tortured nights I spent trapped inside my lump of a body and imagining his rotting out there somewhere until someone, mercifully, told me that Pappa had had him cremated. Past the mousy intern with a lazy eye, that incredible individual who first thought to bang a tuning fork against her knee and then press it, humming, against the soles of my feet; past the joy and trepidation I felt when the reverberations of that note—the A below middle C—made it to my brain, indicating that maybe all was not lost. Past the halo traction and titanium skull screws that same intern drilled into my head so that sixteen pounds of weight could be strung from a series of pulleys, stretching my neck and allowing the vertebrae to heal. Past the rehabilitation, the surgeries, the body braces, the parallel bars, the crutches; past the monumental effort and incredible dedication from a retinue of professionals to where I emerged on the other side, a mere fifteen months later, whole and miraculously uncompromised except for an almost imperceptible decrease in sensation at the very tips of my fingers. And finally, past that glorious day the following July when I walked unassisted down the aisle at my wedding, hips swaying under my beaded gown, swishing satin and grace, and breathless with the victory of it all.
I never rode again, although in the end there was nothing physically wrong with me that would have prevented it. My parents have always believed that I never rode again because I married Roger, but they’ve got it ass-backward. I married Roger so I could move to Minnesota and no one would ever ask me to get on another horse, because no one seemed to understand that it would be exactly that. Another horse.
I tend to think about my accident in terms of metaphors, partly because I think too much and partly because when I finally went to college, I studied English literature. I usually compare it to the first domino to fall, one moment standing solid like a punctuation mark, and then the next setting off a chain of events so inevitable, so unstoppable, that all you can do is stand back and watch.
It’s not until twenty years later that the final three fall.
One. Two. Three.