A horse stepped on me this weekend. I’m fine (really fine – I ran this morning), but I was a little anxious for a couple of hours on Saturday. I spent the day at a horse show just south of Portland. Wendy was there with Tigger, Olive, Dobby (Tigger’s co-dependent pony friend), and Ava (the horse who stepped on me) because two of her 14-year-old students were riding in it. Their events were first thing Saturday, so I got up early and drove up to watch them.
That part, the whole day really, minus the part where I got stepped on, was pretty cool. I got to see my lesson horses compete and do more than I’ve asked them to do, and I got to watch a whole lot of really good riders on really big horses do really cool things. The weather was beautiful (not a cloud in sight), and it was really neat to just hang out and watch all the riding and jumping.
The stepped on part: Wendy needed to clean out stalls, so Elaine (my friend who wrote the romance novel) and I volunteered to take Olive and Ava for a walk to give Wendy time. Ava was anxious, even right next to Olive, and I couldn’t calm her down, so we headed back to the stalls. We got separated (too many people), and Ava basically freaked out. Then someone zipped by on a scooter, and a golf cart passed us, Ava spun around, and while I was trying to turn her the right direction to go home, she stepped on my right foot. Like, STEPPED on with her full weight because she was walking. It was…painful, and I may have yelled some things in front of some children, and then she stepped off and we made our way back over to Wendy. Wendy wasn’t done with her stall, though, so I still had to deal with a giant* nervous horse. I was letting her eat grass, but we were near a food truck and there was an extension cord, and she didn’t like me trying to move her away from the extension cord to keep her from eating it and she was still high-strung even being closer to her herdmates, whirling around every time a car went by, and I wasn’t super calm since my foot hurt and she was making me nervous and I’m sure I wasn’t successfully radiating serenity even though I was trying to, and it was a whole not-fun thing. I was relieved to put her back in her stall.
*I’m not kidding about giant. I mean, there are bigger horses, but she’s the biggest one I’ve had to do anything about. She’s half thoroughbred and half shire (workhorse along the lines of a Clydesdale), and she’s 16.2 hands at her withers (top of her shoulder, a tad higher than the top of the base of her neck), which puts her withers at the top of my head (because if I did the math right, 16.2 hands is 66 inches – the .2 refers to two inches, not two-tenths of a hand – which is my height). That’s big.
I was wearing my chucks that day, not boots, so basically no protection, and I spent the next several hours wiggling my toes and flexing my foot to make sure I still could. The pain faded to an ache, and then that faded, too, and by the time I drove home, I was totally fine. I have a fun bruise I keep poking at, but no lasting damage. Until one day the front half of my foot falls off because it turns out I have a hairline fracture or something and I didn’t rest or treat it because it didn’t hurt, but eh – why borrow trouble?