At 51, I Had a Stroke in My Own Barn and Woke Up Unable to Lift My Left Arm. My Doctor Said I’d Never Ride Again. Nine Months Later, I Entered the Biggest Ranch Horse Show in Texas

The arena at the Will Rogers Center in Fort Worth holds five thousand people.

On the night of the ranch riding class for riders with disabilities, there were about four hundred people in the stands. Families. Friends. Other riders.

And about forty people from Weatherford. Trainers I’d competed against for thirty years. Men I’d beaten. Men who’d beaten me. Every one of them in their good hats.

There were eleven riders in the class. A young veteran who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan. A girl of sixteen with cerebral palsy. A woman my age who’d had a spinal cord injury in a rodeo.

And me.

When they called my number, I rode into the arena on Dually. My left hand was in Grace’s brace, clipped to the reins. My left foot was in a special stirrup with a cage, so it couldn’t slip through.

The pattern takes about two minutes. Walk, trot, lope, a stop, a turn, a back-up, over a pole on the ground.

I’d done it ten thousand times in my life.

This was the hardest one.

At the lope, my left side started to slip. I felt myself going off balance to the right. For one second, I thought I was going to fall in front of four hundred people.

Dually felt it too.

He slowed down. Just a little. Just enough. He shifted under me, moved his weight to the right, and caught me, the way you’d catch someone stepping off a curb.

The judges probably took a point off for that.

I didn’t care.

We finished the pattern.

When I stopped him in the center of the arena, the place exploded. The forty people from Weatherford were on their feet, yelling. Lucy was screaming. Grace was standing at the rail with her hands over her mouth.

I placed fourth.

The young veteran won. He deserved it.

Six weeks later, the external reviewer overturned the insurance company’s denial. The letter said the video of a stroke patient “performing a complex motor pattern on horseback” proved that the therapy was “unambiguously medically necessary.”

The insurance company paid for all fifty-five sessions I’d done at home with Grace.

I paid Grace back. In full. She tried to refuse. I wouldn’t let her.

I still train horses. Fewer than before. My left hand is never going to be what it was.

But every morning, before sunrise, I go into the barn, and I brush Dually with it.

He still stands perfectly still.

I think he knows.