I’ve been having a really hard time motivating myself to ride these last few weeks.
I was officially cleared to go back to normal activity on the weekend of September 9th, after I went and had follow-up bloodwork done to confirm that all of my levels (liver enzymes, primarily) had returned to a normal range and I hadn’t somehow started internally bleeding again.
(A curious side effect of my roughly forty-eight hours in the hospital is that I did not almost have a panic attack while getting blood drawn this time. I guess that’s what happens after people stick needles in your arms every six hours on the dot. I still can’t look though and it remains highly unlikely that I’ll ever have the level of indifference required to actually donate blood.)
I had my first ride back the following week (on the 14th) on arguably the best babysitter in the barn, and all I did was walk. The next time I got on after that, all I did was walk. The time after that, I trotted a little bit. This past week I got on once and I trotted and tried for a little bit of canter (literally four circles). I didn’t even make it into my car that night before my ribs started aching.
It wasn’t break pain. It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t localized to the area where the fracture actually was. It was just this relentless, general, dull ache on the right side of my ribcage. I came home, and I took some ibuprofen, and I haven’t gotten on since. I haven’t really wanted to get on since.
It’s not that I’m afraid of injuring myself again (or at least, I don’t think it is). It’s not that I don’t want to ride. I just… don’t want to ride right now, if that makes any sense.
I’ve only ever been seriously hurt due to horses once before (when I got my concussion) and as much as I had to adapt to the consequences of that, my body was still my body. Once the scrape on my shoulder healed, there were no physical marks on my person that indicated that I’d had a serious fall. I was concussed, but I hadn’t fractured my skull or broken any other bones, so for as long as it took my brain to heal, my body was fine.
This time, that isn’t what happened.
It’s been over two months and I still have trouble laying on my left side (yes, you read that correctly). I’ve always been a side sleeper, and before the injury happened, I always fell asleep on my left side. I (stupidly) thought that would still be the case after this, because the break was on the right side of my ribcage, but it’s actually the opposite. I can sleep on my right side and that isn’t uncomfortable, but when I sleep on my left side, gravity reminds me of the fact that I did actually break a rib, thank you very much. I don’t think it’s still broken, but I can just feel that it was. I can run and it doesn’t hurt (aside from my legs being extra sore), but so much of my fitness has gone that I feel like I’m starting from zero (I’m not, it’s not that bad, but it’s pretty disheartening to only be able to run half as far as I could two months ago). I’m tired in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever been (although that could just as easily be from work stress as anything else). Sometimes my ribs will ache for seemingly no reason at all, and on some of those occasions it only lasts a little while, but other times I’ll feel it for hours.
Really, when it comes down to it, I just don’t feel like me.
I didn’t mention it in my last post, but one of the strangely amusing things about my hospital stay is that at about 7 a.m. that first morning, when I was still down in one of the ER bays waiting for a room, I was awoken by a friend of my brother’s whom I had never met before (even though they’ve known each other for over a decade). He’s an emergency surgery resident and he saw my name on the intake list so he decided to come over and see how I was doing—kind, but this is not the amusing part. The amusing part is that we were both supposed to be at my brother’s housewarming party the night before, but both of us ended up being stuck at the hospital instead (for very different reasons, clearly).
(I know very few of my brother’s friends from college, despite the fact that we went to the same university and overlapped for a year and a half, so of course I would meet one of the few that I now know at 7 o’clock in the morning in an emergency room. Of course.)
The other not-so-amusing part is that I saw him a couple of weeks ago for the first time since that hospital stay. He told me that he hadn’t wanted to say anything while I was actually there because he didn’t want to stress me out, but they regularly have to open people up for liver bleeds far less severe than mine. If I had answered even one question wrong on that Sunday morning when he first stopped by (credit to him, he really wove them in there like it was just a normal conversation about how I was doing) or any of the times after, if any of my levels had been even a bit more off on my blood tests, I would have been in surgery. The fact that I didn’t have to be—the fact that I drove myself to Urgent Care, that I was walking around the ER, that my hemoglobin never dropped out of a normal range despite the fact that I definitely was bleeding internally, that I didn’t ask for any painkillers despite having what is apparently the second-most painful fracture you can have (the first is your skull)—is a bit of a miracle.
(Once again, children: do. not. drive. yourself. anywhere. after. being. kicked. in. the. ribs.)
I’m not afraid because of that—if anything, I feel profoundly lucky, and shoutout to my body for doing me such a solid on the recovery front—but I don’t feel a pressing need to get on any horse right now. The only horse that I really want to ride, of all things, is mine.
I went out to the barn on Sunday and I gave Cooper a bath. This week is weirdly warm for October and I know that I’m going to have to clip him soon (although it probably won’t be the full-body clip that we were originally thinking before this whole suspensory sage began), so I wanted to take the opportunity to make sure he was clean. I’m sure he’s already coated himself in dirt again, but at least this way we’ve gotten rid of the deepest layer of it and I can hopefully just give him a wipe-down with some waterless shampoo and get to it when it’s time to actually do the clipping. I took him to hand-graze afterward for the first time since he put me in the hospital, and when I turned him out, he didn’t want to walk away from the fence, so I ended up going into his field and sitting on the upturned water trough so that we could hang out for a bit.
He’s been extra Golden Retriever-like lately. He comes to the gate every time now when he sees me coming. When I walked the horse I was riding back to the field that second time (when I got on her first instead of grabbing him to groom because we’re racing against sunset these days), he whinnied at me (which he doesn’t normally do). He stands there and waits until I walk away when I turn him out. I’m sure a lot of it is just that I’m really the treat lady now since I haven’t been able to do anything with him other than groom him and give him cookies, but he’s the one that I want to spend time with. I don’t want to be running to get on another horse and only give him ten minutes of my time in the evening, because he is the one that I want to reach my goals with.
My goals haven’t gone away. I’ve obviously had to push them back, and we’ll see what limits all of this places on him (if any) once he’s back into work, but they’re still there. It’s hard for me to reorient them when so many of them are contingent on him. I don’t have the money for another horse. I don’t want another horse. I listened to that gut feeling when I had it four and a half years ago, and he may have put me in the hospital, but I don’t blame him for it at all. I don’t want anything right now other than to get back up on him. We’re in this whole thing together, and I guess that’s what I’m holding out for.
Cooper’s recheck is this weekend and I am hoping to hell that he’ll be allowed to start back up under saddle, even if all we’re doing is walking for thirty minutes with five minutes of trot thrown in there. I’m expecting it to be a slow winter, and I think that’s exactly what we both need. He’s lost all of the topline that we built in the first half of this year, and I’ve lost my fitness, so back to square one we go yet again. I don’t want to whine, because I know that in the grand scheme of injuries and problems that people have with their horses, all of this is small potatoes, but I’m just… tired and disheartened and I want to ride my horse.
Hopefully this time next week I’ll be able to say that I have.
Spymaster Equestrian 