One Year

Below: Me and the bouquet of flowers Wildman gave me to celebrate our one year anniversary. I say "our anniversary" because it happened to both of us. To all of us.

As the anniversary of my accident has rapidly drawn near, I have had a strong desire to put on paper my feelings about it. I'm finding it very difficult. I have all these abstract thoughts and feelings, and seem to be at a loss as to how to organize them enough to write them.

I have found that the weather triggers flashbacks. I have found that I have an extreme desire to slow down. My favorite thing to do lately is to sit in a lawn chair on the patio and bask in the warm sunshine...doing absolutely nothing. I let my mind just wander. There are times when I feel like the accident happened to someone else, it feels so distant and storylike. I look at and feel my scars, and the memories of what happened are there, but feel so far away. There are other times when I am blindsided and overwhelmed by the raw emotions and feelings I experienced during that time...so I know they are all still there and that it really did happen to me. The pain I experience daily is an almost constant reminder of what happened. I am changed. I find it so much easier to not only enjoy, but appreciate the little and simple things in life. There are also the BIG things I realize and appreciate more...like being able to walk to the bathroom by myself. Or, just walking. Or being able to wrestle with my kids, or hike through a canyon, or enjoy the warm sunshine because I'm in it, not looking at it through a window....or hug my horse and breathe in that wonderfully horsey smell. The act of walking, to me, is now a symbol of freedom and the freedom of choice. The fact that I am not only alive, but walking and alive, running and alive, riding and alive, hiking and alive, is proof that there is a living God who loves me and watches over me. Though my 900 pound panicked horse crushed me into the hard ground, shattering my pelvis and fracturing my spine, I didn't have one single bruise. The only bruises I ever had were from the IV's and blood draws in the hospital. Though I had bones tear through my flesh, my bladder did not rupture or burst, and I had no organs even remotely damaged. My femoral artery was not severed and I did not bleed to death before the paramedics arrived. I never had any complications from surgery or medications. I walked after three months and rode my horse again only five months after the accident. To me, this says that my experience was "hand-tailored". There was no more and no less than what I needed to experience to gain the most. I am changed. I don't simply want to be alive, I want to live.