He eventually returned and I was very happy. For the past six weeks, I’d been doing three and a half people’s work at work and it was starting to not be very funny anymore. So I was really, really pleased when Patrick reappeared late on Tuesday night at Sacramento Airport. “Ah, I thought, that’s better... everything will get back to normal now...”
What a joke.
The following day, Patrick took a much needed day off work. He rode about on the levee on his motorcycle and then decided to visit Provo. He’d been reading Monty Robert’s book all about horse training and was inspired, so he turned Provo in the round pen for a while and was astonished how well Monty Robert’s methods worked on Provo - who is very adept at tuning you out in the round pen. Infact, Provo was so mellow and attentive after his training session, that Patrick (foolish boy that he was, being lulled into a false sense of security by Provo’s casual demeanour) decided to ride him bareback around the paddock.
Now Provo has been well trained in his past life. When you get on him, it obviously means that it’s “time to go”, so “go” he does... without actually letting you get on him properly. Off he went, with Patrick starting to scrabble and try and get in the right position. He quickly realised “hey, this isn’t going to happen” and decided to slide off the back of him. Provo isn’t exactly a big horse, he’s only 14.3 hh, so we’re not talking a huge drop to the ground, but Patrick was wearing his motorcycle boots - not recommended for stunts. They are like those ski boots - you know the ones - they don't bend at all at the ankle. So Patrick hit the dirt, taking care not to land on his “bad right leg” (bad knee from previous surgery), and promptly snapped his left leg into several pieces.
And was there anyone around? Nah. Patrick lay by the gate for 40 minutes, waiting for someone to arrive. Provo disappeared unconcernedly off down the other end of the paddock, grazing, whereas Mouse, bless her, spent several minutes anxiously trying to help, necessitating Patrick having to throw clods of mud at her to get her to go away.
Eventually the guy who feeds the horses turned up and heard Patrick’s yells. Two fire engines and an ambulance were called (not clear what the fire engines were for) and they whisked Patrick to the hospital to be filled with drugs.
The following day, they operated on it, adding a long metal plate down the side, three 3" long [wood?] screws in the top and 8 smaller screws down the side. They sewed up as much as they could, but his leg was so swollen, they could only close half the incision which ran from above his knee to his ankle.
Four days later, they were able to close it completely with 53 stitches/staples, and two days after that they sent him home.
I'm not sure about them sending him home. They’d been doing “physical therapy” on him while in hospital - this involved getting him upright and having him shuffle around the room with walker. The interesting part about this, is that every time they tried to get him upright, he passed out.
I’ve never seen anyone pass out before. I imagined that they did it like in the films: their eyes would roll slightly, then close and they’d slipped relaxedly to the floor in a polite manner.
Hint: this isn’t what happens.
In Patrick’s case, he would announce “I'm going to pass out” and then promptly turn into a vegetable.
I’m not kidding.
His eyes would stay open - wildly staring, he would drool slightly, and he would maintain his death grip on his walker.
At least I was glad I’d witnessed this in the hospital, because it meant I wasn’t quite so freaked out when he did it when we were getting out of the car coming home from the hospital. Except that time he did it standing up, with me struggling to support him, frantically trying to hold his 6'1" frame up (and making sure his bad leg didn’t take any weight). I’m only 5'1", and was starting to panic mildly after about 40 seconds when he wasn’t walking up and he was starting to slide. Eventually he came out of it...
...only to repeat it a few days later in a crowded lift when we had to visit the doctor. It was Halloween and we went in to have a check up. On the way out, between Floor 4 and Floor 2, Patrick announced “I'm going to pass out”, so we propped him up in the corner and let him do his thing.
At Floor 2 a load of people got out and asked politely if we were coming out. “Er, no, we’ll just stay here for a minute”, at which point they noticed that Patrick wasn’t quite right. I imagine that they thought he was retarded or something, because he certainly never looked like he’d fainted. They asked if I wanted to sit him down on a bench in the foyer outside (still not sure how they thought I was going to get him there), but we declined this one too, and carried on down to the basement. By the time we got there, Patrick was nearly back again and a guy helped us by keeping the door open so I was able to extract us from the lift. Interesting experience. Not.
He gobbled propacet/darvocet every few hours and slept only a couple of hours at a time at night because of the pain. We had to install a seat in the shower and do interesting things with his leg stuck out of the shower sideways under the shower curtain, and all in all, life was not fun.
After about five weeks, he started sleeping back in our bed (with a few false starts), could nearly fit in the shower with his leg propped up on the end of the bath, and could walk from one end of the house to the other with his crutches. He wore rough spots under his arms from the crutch handles.
Very kindly, his company agreed to have him work at home for as long as he needed to, so we set up his computer, modem, telephone, so he could use them from the bed.
By Christmas, we were able to visit his Mum in Cambria and fetch home the Red Car from its extended vacation. We needed to do this, because we’d decided to buy ourselves an automatic truck and needed the Red Car as a trade in. The truck was to kill two birds with one stone - providing us with an automatic vehicle which Patrick would be able to drive about in, one-legged, and a means of moving horses in the future (i.e. when we got around to being able to a afford to buy a trailer).
As I write this, Patrick’s doing well. Over six months after the event, he can nearly straighten his leg and can nearly bend it as much as the other one. It’s a little bandy (as the doctor said, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear), but starting to look a little better now he’s building up some muscle tone. He goes to physical therapy twice a week, where they torture him unmercifully and make him so sore that he has to sit quietly for a couple of days afterwards. But he has to stretch those tendons and ligaments that haven’t been used in so long. His scar is fading along the front of his leg, but still looks fairly interesting in places. He can hobble about 100 m without his crutches, and this morning did a creditable impersonation of someone who only has a slight limp. Admittedly, he can only do that for a few steps though, and then has to go back to his standard rolling gait - this is why he needs to get his leg to go completely straight. It looks like his leg may be a quarter of an inch shorter than it once was...
In conclusion, I think it is only normal that someone who managed
to blow his right knee up catching a frisbee, should be able to do such
a supremely large amount of damage to his other leg by hopping off a horse
that is barely five foot high. I’m suspicious that he could have done the
same jumping off a fence, but instead chose to label Provo with “Leg Breaker”
reputation. That’s what I call mean.
October 1997