The Diagnosis

No bumps in this road--this is my street

Another bump in the road besides relapsing on the cigarettes is it turns out my back is broken after all. My girlfriend says to stop talking negatively, it’s not actually broken. She says broken would be like if you had two bones that were completely snapped in half like a wishbone. In that case I think I would be paralyzed because the spine protects the spinal cord and that would be pretty negative but that’s not happening.

I have two fractures (T12 and L3), one “severe”, and a multitude of wear-and-tear issues—degenerative disc disease in many of the discs and some kind of scoliosis thing that’s probably from my bad posture. I’m not too worried about the degenerative disc disease and the scoliosis thing. I expected that. Most of us cowgirls have that. It’s from riding and lifting fifty-pound bags of grain and pushing wheelbarrows. You get that. I also had a feeling about the fractures. This back pain felt different. It is not the worst pain that I’ve had but it’s different. It feels like an accordion collapsing in on itself and when the doctor drew me a picture, that’s exactly what it looked like.

I have to go to the orthopedic doctor. He will probably order an MRI so they can make sure the fractures are stable. If they are stable, it’s just a matter of rest, possibly a brace, and if I could, water therapy might help. (I learned this from the Internet, not from my family doctor who knew squat. I call family doctors “gateway doctors” nowadays. You have to go to them to get referrals to go to the real doctor who will fix you.) If they’re not stable, I would need surgery. They would put something in there to hold it together so that the bones don’t impinge on the spinal cord. Trying to be positive, I assume I’d be in more pain if the fractures weren’t stable so I’m not losing any sleep over it.

But I’m afraid my barrel racing career is over before it even got started. All these years I’ve been trying to do it and one thing or another got in the way, mostly moving. Every time I got my horse ready, we decided to move again and then I had to fix the house and stage the house and sell the house (we always sell it ourselves with no real estate agent so that takes a lot of work) and pack the house (one time I packed the house completely by myself because Kurt was recuperating from double bypass surgery—he didn’t even see the new house when I bought it because he was in the hospital) and then we’d move into a new house and we’d have to build fences and build barns and replace roofs and replace heating systems…. And start our business all over again. That’s like starting a whole new business! I’d get halfway settled in and then start riding my horse again and I’d go to a barrel race or two, and then something else would happen. So all these years I never really got going. And now I don’t know if I will ever be able to get going. Those high speeds and hairpin turns really throw you around in the saddle and I’d be afraid I’d reinjure the healed fractures. I imagine it will always be a weak area and the spine is nothing to mess around with.

I’m not ruling it out though. I am looking into protective vests. The eventers wear them. Jockeys wear them. They protect your ribs and your spleen but I don’t know how well they protect your spine because they don’t stop the spine from compressing. I know of a company that makes a safety vest that blows up like an air mattress when you fall off the horse. It attaches to the horn by a cord and when you fall off, the cord breaks and the vest inflates. We made jokes when we were told how it works by the vendor at Colonial Nationals a couple of years ago. He zeroed right in on us because he thought we were an easy mark since Kelly was one of the only riders wearing a helmet, plus she had emergency-release stirrups, a real rarity in the western world. He probably thought, “Here’s a family that’s safety conscious!” But we laughed. We wanted to know if we’d bounce. We asked if there was a parachute attached to it because when Bullet bucked, Bullet bucked hard and one time Kurt landed up in a tree.

But now I’m thinking it’s not so funny after all. I’m trying to be positive but there’s nothing wrong with taking every safety precaution as possible. Because bumps in the road, or the arena, really hurt.
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My Helmet Saved My Life

Last night I had a bit of a horse wreck. I’m okay. I’m assuming I’m okay since I’m walking. That must mean there aren’t any broken bones. But it hurt. I hit hard. I hit so hard I peed myself. I landed on my back and slammed my head. Twice. My head actually bounced and I picked up a couple of pounds of dirt in my clothes and my orifices—mouth, nose, ears—while I continued the forward motion and skidded towards home on my back, head first.

Luckily we were already past the timer when Lowdown decided that this was fun and yee-ha, he had a couple of bucks in him. (I got second place.) Unluckily, I wasn’t expecting it and there was no warning or else I think I could have stayed on. But it happened so fast, I didn’t even know what happened. Usually, if a horse starts bucking, I experience a couple of seconds of panic where I’m struggling to maintain my seat and the ground or the sky is flashing by. Sometimes I’m even riding side-saddle for a stride or two. Not real side-saddle but I’m hanging off the side of a saddle by one leg and a prayer, so I call that side-saddle. Then I manage to somehow pull myself back on. The last few times my horse bucked (not always the same horse, just in general—whenever I have been on a bucking horse), I was able to pull myself back on and keep my seat. One time it was pure luck. Harley bucked, I went off, actually went up in the air, and then I fell back down on him in just the right spot, landed smack dab in the middle of my saddle with a big plump! before he took off running. My feet even slipped right back into the stirrups like they’d never been disengaged. That was lucky.

This time I’m lucky I’m not dead. That’s how hard my head hit. I felt it in slow motion—Clunk! Clunk!—and in that split second, my brain, well protected and safe, and therefore still able to do its job, thought Thank god I wear a helmet now!

I never used to wear a helmet. I used to say they were uncomfortable. I used to say it interfered with my vision when I had one on and I couldn’t hear well. Though helmets don’t block your eyes or your ears. I don’t know how I thought anybody would believe that, but that’s what I was shoveling. The real reason is, I was too vain. They look dorky. I’m not going to lie. I still think they are dorky-looking. Even though I wear one now. I look like a big dorky egg-head when I’m wearing my helmet. No more sexy cowgirl galloping across the field of buttercups, long blonde hair flowing in the breeze…. No more cool rodeo chick in fringe shirt, blingy belt, and cowboy hat—black in winter, straw for the summer…. No more of that. The party is over. On top of my figure mysteriously changing shape, thickening around the middle since I’ve gone into menopause like I’m suddenly melting (and maybe I am, if these hot flashes are any indication), I started wearing a dorky helmet. It is not sexy.

I had to do it for the kid. How could I keep making her wear one if I was not? I actually carried on like this for a few years—made her wear one but I didn’t. When she questioned me, I appealed to her sympathy—“I tried but I just could not get used to it! In my day, they didn’t have helmets!”

I urged her to do some critical thinking—“If I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge too? ”

I used her grandmother—“Nana always said, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’” looked sheepish, and lit up a cigarette. (I don’t smoke anymore either.)

But she never fought me on it. She was never allowed on a horse without a helmet from the time we started leading her around on Minnie when she was three-years-old and so I imagine her helmet is like a headstall to her—a necessary piece of equipment that you don’t think twice about and even if her mother doesn’t wear one, her mother’s stupidity is more of a conundrum than ammunition not to wear her own.

However, my hypocrisy bothered me. Now that she was older and she could look at me with admiration due to my behavior and not simply because I was her mother, or disapproval, I had to behave better. I decided to at least try one. Give it a good try. Not just throw on some extra helmet someone had lying around. Get the right one. Research which ones were comfortable, what would work best for me, and get the proper size. And that’s what I did. (FYI, I got a Tipperary.)

The day I found myself cooling out my horse with my helmet still on because I’d forgotten to take it off because it was so comfortable was the day I knew the bullshit was over and I was a helmet-wearer.

I’m not going to say it looks nice. I am no hot number with my hair blowing in the breeze anymore. But I have a head. And brains can be quite sexy.

Helmets come in many styles. Here is the cowboy hat with helmet built-in (is my head too big?), and my personal favorite, the shark.