In January, I noticed my right shoulder hurt a little when I lifted my arm straight out to the side. Right, I won’t do that for a while and then we’ll be good as new, I said to myself, patting myself on the back for such a good medical diagnosis. But as the weeks wore on, the pain got worse and worse, until in February just reaching to adjust the music volume in my car was difficult. Dammit I said, knowing exactly what was wrong and heading off to a doctor to be told anyway.
From Wikipedia
My Acromioclavicular (AC) Joint has been at a grade three separation since summer 2014. This means the top of my right shoulder has a nifty bump where my bone juts out instead of being attached to the rest of my shoulder and also that it’s a delicate flower prone to reinjury (as I recently experienced).
The long story short is, five years ago I rode like an asshole and got what I deserved, a lifetime of a shoulder that’s not quite attached as it should be. If you stop reading here, just take away the lesson of: Do Not Ride Like A Dick. Now here’s the long story, so that any of my comrades out there may avoid my mistakes.
Seemore and his former leasee, who rode him very well and never shredded her shoulder with him
This is Seemore. He’s a lesson horse at my barn in Pittsburgh, a handsome appendix who has carried many a rider through successful dressage shows and events.
Seemore, like most lesson horses, is a Good Egg. He was never my favorite to ride, on account of being a little heavy on the hands, but is a Good Egg adored by many and I can respect we all have different tastes in horses.
In summer 2014, I’d been riding him for a few weeks and planned to take him to a mini trial at the end of June, slowly coming around to #teamSeemore. For whatever reason, I’d come to our group jump lesson that night with an Attitude. In hindsight, 2014 wasn’t my best mental health year (finding your way after college is hard even if you have a job and maybe I’ll write about that sometime as well) so who knows exactly why I was cranky that night.
Being a professional and also an adult, I’m pretty solid at putting my mood aside and riding through it, often coming out the other side in a better mood anyway (yay ponies!). But not that night. Seemore was feeling extra heavy on the forehand that night and was happily dragging my cranky ass out of the saddle after each fence. As we were schooling a small cross country fence on an even smaller slope, his heaviness felt even more pronounced than it did in the arena. It didn’t take long for your young heroine to go from cranky to downright angry.
This is the part of the story where I was a bad human. Do not do what I did, which was angrily try and solve the problem by jumping the fence at a high rate of speed. I knew better than to do this in 2014. I really know better than to do this in 2019. In fact, my jumping instructor has told me “speed kills” so many times I hear it in my sleep. But I let my emotions get the better of me, I did it anyway, and it ended exactly as you’d expect.
We flew over the fence in a fairly disorganized manner, landing horribly, pitching me head over teacups and slamming into the ground directly on my shoulder. Because I am (occasionally) a good eventer, I had my safety vest on and managed to thankfully not totally destroy my young shoulder.
I bounced up quickly, anger gone and incredibly embarrassed. My arm and shoulder hurt but it was nothing unbearable and I immediately wanted to get back on. A friend handed me Seemore’s reins and I tried to lift my arm to grab the saddle to hop back on and try again. Arm wouldn’t move.
I wish I could say my strongest memory from that night was the lessons learned or the kindness from my friends who took care of Seemore and drove me to the hospital, but it was actually the panic from realizing my brain was telling my arm to move and it just...wasn’t.
As a side bar, my biggest injury fear is a dislocated shoulder. Give me stitches, give me fractures, give me giant ugly bruises, but please keep your dislocated shoulders that get popped back into place. Even writing this is skeeving me out, so you can imagine the growing fear that I was now going to have someone pop my shoulder into place was fairly significant.
Once it was clear there would be no “getting back on the horse” that night one friend tended a very apologetic Seemore (who got apology cookies from my good hand before it headed to the hospital) while Saskia, my incredible best friend and witness to my fall, took me for xrays.
Sparing you the drama of unsympathetic tech who tried to bully my shoulder into a more easily xrayable position (spoilers, when the joint holding your bone in place is shredded, no amount of yelling at patients gives them the ability to move said shoulder) I walked away from the incident with a sling, lots of physical therapy, and a polite refusal of surgery.
But, more importantly, I walked away with a forever reminder not to ever, ever rage ride. I knew halfway through that jump lesson that my cranky pants were keeping me from having a productive ride and I stubbornly stuck with it anyway. After my accident, I do my best to leave the cranky pants in the car, to never take out a bad day on a horse. We all lose tempers and get frustrated, but I can’t stress enough the importance of doing that literally anywhere but on top of your horse. Even next to your horse while you hand graze is better than on top of the horse.
Assuming that you’re also a human with moods and emotions, you know this is easier said than done. Zoe and Dizzy both like to test my patience (actually all horses do, but I’ve ridden them most recently). Zoe is a perfectionist and doesn’t appreciate mixed messages or mistakes. Too many times, she kicked out or skipped a movement or threatened to stand up if she didn’t like the way I asked for a change or an extension or whatever. Most of the time I took these moments with grace, learning from my mistake and pressing onward to better dressage. But every so often I felt like screaming “you know what I want you to do, just do it!”
Zoe says No
But alas, her English isn’t great, so it would have just been screaming into the wind. Instead, in these moments, I stopped. We abandoned whatever we were schooling and moved to something else, usually something easy so we could both have a win. If the ride allowed, we came back to the frustrating movement later, or the next day. But I’ve found that it’s always better to abandon ship than insist you’re going to get it right no matter what and then spiral downwards.
Dizzy tests my patience as well, but in different ways. Rarely content to just walk on a loose rein, Dizzy needs constant attention to keep her focus on the task at hand. This means that even after a long schooling ride, we need to spend our cooldown changing directions or making circles or bending gently in and out. Sometimes I want hop off, look her in those lovely brown eyes, and say “please just relax and walk in a straight line, that is a very basic Horse Skill and I know you can do it.” But her English is also pretty shaky so I continue to work within her reality. Getting tense and angry with a tense horse is a literal recipe for disaster so in those moments, there’s nothing to do but take deep breaths and calmly insist we walk out the cooldown.
Spending two months this year on the ground while my shoulder re-healed wasn’t always fun, especially as the weather started to warm and the temptation to ride grew. (It was pretty easy to skip the barn in February when the midwest was getting slammed by snow!)
But I put that time to good use, grooming a very sheddy Dizzy, watching her play with her fjord friend, and free lunging. It was a nice reminder that I really do love being around horses, even without the fun of riding. And hopefully this summer, as that lovely redhead tests my patience in all her creative ways, I can remember the calm of what we achieved through groundwork. Failing that, I’ll reach over to my right shoulder, poke the bone that still sticks out a bit, and remember what happened the last time I lost my temper under saddle.