Sometimes I wish I had some pictures of me falling off a horse. I bet it would make for an interesting pose, though I would need a camerawoman with a quick lense -- when I get dumped I generally get dumped hard! That out of the way, I will tell you about my first hard fall, which was completely 100% totally my fault.
When I was in fourth grade, and we had just moved out to Ferndale, DerB and Ke were kept at Quail Hollow, a lovely Arabian farm in Clermont, FL. My dad had driven me there to ride one weekend morning, and I was just trotting DerB in the arena. It was a long time ago, and I don't remember why I came off, I just remember it hurt. I was a dapper little tomboy, however, and my father was disappointed that I didn't climb back on. He didn't understand that I wanted to, I just physically couldn't. He wouldn't even open the passenger's side door of his truck for me.
My mother was leaving the Ferndale house when my dad and I were driving back and she turned around to come back because she knew something was up if we were heading home that early. There was no swelling, no bruising, and no one believed that it hurt as much as it did. I sat on the couch at eleven o'clock that morning. Around five or six that afternoon I hadn't left the couch and was still begging for more ice, so my mother conceded that I was "not that good of an actress" and they took me to the emergency room.
We waited forever in the ER, as I wasn't outwardly bleeding, vomiting, or convulsing, and I met a very nice nurse who chatted with me about horses while we waited. They put my arm in a sling and it stopped hurting so long as I didn't move, so they began to think that whatever I had messed up had corrected itself. The doctor conceded to x-rays when I screamed at his probing fingers. My I Told You So came soon enough when the doctor arrived with the x-rays to see me chatting with my parents and said, "I don't think it's broken." He slipped the pictures onto the light and said, "Wow, it's broken alright. Three places."
I had what the doctor described as a spiral break and two slanting fractures in my right arm. They couldn't bandage it there for some reason, so we went to another hospital about forty five minutes away. By this time I was very cranky, and of course rubbing in that I had a broken arm all that time they thought I was fibbing and kept me on the couch. I was told not to ride for six weeks, keep the cast dry, etc. If you are reading this and you are a rider then you can understand, however, why I had my dad letting me back up onto DerB in a matter of a couple weeks -- He just made me promise not to fall again until I was healed :-)