There ain’t no easy horses

But you gotta learn to ride.

-Schuyler, Knowblock, and Overstreet

I should have known better, but I was so anxious to get into the saddle. The new environment made the horse uneasy, and in short order, this heretofore gentle gelding reared up to give me a blow in the sternum with the saddle horn. That surprised me and put me in a daze. I was an easy mark when he followed up with a buck that sent me endoing over his head. I landed squarely on my shoulder. It was fine, but when I went to stand up and take my place more alertly atop that horse, I realized that in the grand mix of the fall, while my top end was arriving back to the earth first, my bottom half must have followed along at some point. Back on my feet, I could feel some slithering around inside my left foot. It would not bear my weight.

Mother Earth will catch you,

Don’t be afraid to try.

-Schuyler, Knowblock, and Overstreet

When I was young, I had witnessed my dad breaking his ankle in his cowboy boot. By the time he got around to taking his injury seriously, his ankle had swollen to the point that he had to cut the boot off. I knew that my foot was going to swell, so I sat down and had DeeDee pull that boot off me. Oh boy! Any thoughts that I may have had that all my senses were starting to dull with age were cleared away in a big, bright flash of undiluted pain. I looked at my ankle and did a visual confirmation of my initial evaluation that something was wrong inside there.

Last summer, at our old home in Riverton, DeeDee had broken a bone in her foot. It may have seemed foolish at the time, but someone had the wise idea of moving the knee scooter she used for that injury down here instead of downsizing it over to the thrift store. That turned out to be a helpful premonition. The thing was quickly fetched, and the next saddle I found my way into was for my knee. This scooter, however, turned out to be just as unruly as the horse. Back on the paved streets and sidewalks of Riverton, the vehicle was in its natural element, but here in the gravel and the uneven terrain of Sanpete County, it had somewhat outstripped its qualifications. It kept seizing up on the stony pathway leading into my house. The horse threw me once; the scooter threw me twice

Going down the stoney end.

I never wanted to go down the stoney end

– Barbra Streisand

Inside the house, I encountered my four granddaughters, who had eyewitnessed the whole spectacle of their grandfather being thrown from a horse. They mostly seemed unfazed. The third one, four years old, said, “Are we going to ride the horse, or what?” I asked the oldest, ten years old, how I looked with my bronc-busting. She said I looked fantastic, that I had tucked my endo into an elegant somersault. I asked her what score she would give me, and she said I got a 10. That’s more of a Dancing with the Stars rating than a rodeo score, but I took it. I asked the second one, seven years old, for her evaluation, and she said that she was worried about me, but she gave the horse a perfect score for form.

That day before Mother’s Day was DeeDee’s birthday, and the house was filled with her children celebrating her birth and her giving birth. Our daughter and son had made a fancy dinner, steak and lobster. We couldn’t really break things off for an X-ray visit before we sat down with our family in gratitude for making something special for DeeDee. Besides that, our friends and next-door neighbors had come over to help with the horse and visit. After the birthday cake and the ice cream, though, we had to shoo them all out.

At dusk, we headed for the Sanpete Valley Hospital emergency room. As we drove west toward Highway 89, a great horned owl flew across the street right in front of our windshield and landed on the top of a telephone pole. That’s not really the kind of sign you want to see as you drive to the hospital

‘Been a hoot owl howling outside my window now,

‘Bout six nights in a row

   – Michael Martin Murphy

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.

– G.W.F. Hegel

We arrived at the hospital to discover that even out here in the country, one has to pass through a labyrinth of back alleys and byways to find one’s way into the emergency room. Architects build hospitals the way lawyers build laws. There may be some internal logic to them, but one can really only discover what’s happening after a long ceremonial initiation. For some reason, all emergency rooms must be situated in a medical complex in the same arrangement that Japanese towns insist on for the homes of the butcher’s family, or that medieval European towns likewise insisted upon for the homes of executioners and their families. We navigated to the nether regions of the complex, where emergencies are attended to, and found there that we would probably have to park illegally in order to accommodate getting those of us who could not walk into the building.

This was a Saturday night, and I was expecting an unfavorable triage ranking for the lowly ankle injury. Surely, the waiting room would be filled with Saturday-night partiers who, after long bouts of drinking, had mutually decided in anger to open up each other’s bodies in various ways, with victims of drive-by shootings, and with the miscellaneous farm equipment accidents that could be looked after now that the work day was finally ended. Instead, we found the place was empty. In our own way, we were therapy for them. They were waiting for us. We stepped right up to the window to financially obligate ourselves to whatever might lie ahead, where we met our tour guide through the abundance of paperwork. She stepped out of the windowed office through the door into the lobby proper to help us with something or other, and in doing so, she locked herself out of her sequestered office. Without any hesitation, she climbed into the office through the window.

We were whisked right away to a draped module in the emergency examination area. DeeDee, however, could not enter until she moved the car. No sooner had I finished correcting for the at-first misleading statements I had made about my height, weight, and age, than the nurse-practitioner and chief of operations was there examining my damaged limb. X-rays would be required, and almost instantaneously, a radiologist appeared who brought the machine to me. I, and now DeeDee, who had returned from moving the car to another part of Mount Pleasant, settled in for what we thought would be the long wait as the X-rays, accompanied by Virgil, first descended into hell and then ascended through purgatory and finally into paradise, where at last they might be interpreted. Here at Sanpete Valley, however, that process was short-circuited and our nurse practitioner chief returned very quickly with the utterances from the Oracle. A break had indeed occurred, and a pretty severe one at that. They showed me the X-rays, but I am with all radiology as Colonel Potter from “M*A*S*H” was with ink blots — they all look like horses. I was commended to appear at the surgeon’s office at 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday morning. The radiologist appeared again almost instantaneously to insert me into the tube that would render a CT scan. I knew that prior to the sacred interpretation of radiology being handed down, the radiologist was under a gag order, but ex post, I suspected she would be willing to offer an informal interpretation. She said that she had seen worse. After the CT, I was returned to the tented module where DeeDee awaited. Two nurses flew in and threw a half cast onto my leg and foot. They delivered me a pair of crutches, and we were out of there.

We walked, well, DeeDee walked, I rolled into the surgeon’s office promptly at 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday morning to find two female warders framed behind another window office looking out onto a lobby. Having a backup on the inside seemed a wise strategy. These two clearly would have no need of climbing through the window, the technical term for which is de-defenestration. It is important to use technical terms in a medical setting. I identified myself as the person having the 8:15 appointment. They responded with a strong insistence that they knew of no such appointment. One warder disappeared momentarily from the window frame and returned with an update. Sure enough, an appointment had been made. The two warders, however, could not quite shake off their doubts about this suspicious and irregular appointment. Still, when the moment came, we were not hindered from entering through the portal into the inner sanctum of the medical office.

Soon the surgeon joined us in an examination room. He was armed with a full bone model of a human foot and ankle. Using this and CT images he held up on his phone, he began to make clear to me the nature of the damage I had suffered. Then he told me what the repair was going to require: an L-shaped plate and fastening screws. Using the model, he showed me where the plate would be located. He went over a few more details of the surgery, and that was it. The total presentation had been clear, precise, and succinct. I left the office feeling like I knew what was going to happen to me. I also got the feeling that before I healed, I would be struck with a firebrand of pain. I was scheduled to return to Sanpete Valley Hospital for surgery two days hence.

In the meantime, I received not one but two phone calls and an e-mail giving me detailed instructions on how to prepare myself for surgery. I needed to fast. I needed to cleanse myself with antibacterial soap. This last step meant that I had to buy antibacterial soap. I needed to wear clothing compatible with an orthopedic boot. I needed to have someone who could take me away after the surgery. DeeDee volunteered for this and also for getting the soap. The first phone call required me to come to the hospital at 5 a.m., an hour before the scheduled surgery. The second phone call revised this requirement to 5:15 a.m. I was told how to navigate the inscrutable hospital architecture to arrive at the place of surgery.

On the morning of, having sufficiently fasted, I set out working my way through the other prep steps. As I shaved, I was led to draw a comparison between prepping for surgery and prepping for execution. I washed myself with the bland soap and discovered that over time, I must have developed a cozy relationship with skin bacteria because having it removed set me to itching. The bag I placed over the cast slipped down while I was in the shower. The bandages, the gauze, and the cast got soaked.  I dressed in the appropriate loose clothing, and the cast soaked my left pant leg. I dripped all the way into the surgical center.  We made our way through the early morning darkness to the southwest entry into the hospital.

Inside, I rolled up to a smiling face situated behind still one more window looking out onto a lobby. I supplied my insurance cards and driver’s license, and I began checking the boxes and supplying my signature on the electronic pad the attendant handed me. I was given access to a contract that I must sign before we could proceed. I realized that it was a mistake to excuse me from those 15 minutes from 5 to 5:15 a.m. They must have thought that I was a faster reader. I would definitely need the full hour to make it through that contract. So, given the rush to complete the forms, I did what any truly rational person would do: I credited the text to boilerplate, I glanced at the bolded headings, and I signed. I also made a joke about the clause that allowed the hospital to search my stuff for illegal substances. I asked DeeDee to take the illegal substances out of my bag and return them to the car. This turned out to be no laughing matter for the attendant. She said, “You joke about that, but you should have seen the patient who ran out of the emergency room when the police arrived.” “Well, sure,” I thought, “but this is surgery. That is just the kind of disreputable conduct that makes hospital architects everywhere place emergency rooms in the back regions by the butchers and the executioners.”

While I was checking the boxes on the pad, I faced the inevitable question. I was reluctant to say what happened to me. I was afraid that among the boxes to be checked would be yes or no boxes for questions such as, “Have you ever defaulted on a debt to a hospital?” “Have you ever been involved in a catastrophic irrigation accident?” “Have you ever suffered an injury from a horse riding failure?” I figured that if I answered “yes” to the latter two questions, the hospital authorities would be required by law to turn my name over to the Sanpete County Immigration Services, who would escort me to the borders of the territory and expel me for improper credentials. I would have to rely on my status as a gun owner to offset those failures, and even at that, perhaps my voting rights would be restricted. I was, however, relieved of these worries by the prep nurse, who made it clear that the Sanpete Valley Hospital’s fundamental categories of orthopedic injury are a) motorcycle-caused, and b) horse-caused. I was given the distinct impression that these categories are mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive. This came as a great relief.

This same nurse explained to me the technical system of robing for surgery. She ended her presentation by telling me not to forget the “huntin’ cap,” and indeed the little knitted surgical cap I was to wear was done up in hunter orange. “C’mon,” she said; “if you have horses, you must also be a hunter.” I followed her robing instructions, and then she led me to a gurney. She never missed a beat in her stories of horses and of nearly hitting a huge bull elk on Highway 89 one morning as she adroitly slipped the needle for an IV into my vein. She was in the middle of telling me about how the Manti tornado of 2002 had hit her property and had taken her outbuildings when the surgeon poked his head through the curtain. Soon, the anesthesiologist arrived. He was sporting swag from the university where I teach. An ally. With his arrival, it seemed that a full operating quorum had convened. The surgeon pushed my Gurney into an operating room.

Two seconds later, I emerged from the anesthesiologist’s time warp, and a recovery nurse greeted me upon my reentry into consciousness. She seemed to want to give me instructions, but the anesthesia had absolutely sunk my normally acute commitment to paying attention. I now had no commitments. Somehow, DeeDee was teleported into our presence, and she did the listening for me. I felt myself only indirectly tied to the events around me. I did, however, take seriously the nurse’s offer of a Diet Coke, which turned out to be unbelievably delicious. By some mystical process, I ended up with my own clothes on. The nurse put my new orthopedic boot on me and showed me that it could be pumped with air. Fascinating. A wheelchair appeared outside of our tent, and I was made to believe that I would be using it to evacuate this place. I piled into it, and pretty soon, I was in the parking lot of Terril’s while DeeDee filled my prescription. In my present state of consciousness, I had made the executive decision that I should end my fast with Terril’s doughnuts. DeeDee brought me out a sack of them and another Diet Coke. The pharmacist finished formulating and molding my pills and placed them into DeeDee’s hands sometime after I had run out of doughnuts. I swallowed down oxycodone with Diet Coke, and DeeDee returned me home to heal.

There ain’t no easy horses,

But you gotta learn to ride.

You may fall, you may stumble,

Before you hit your stride.

Mother Earth will catch you,

Don’t be afraid to try.

There ain’t no easy horses,

But you gotta learn to ride.