What a strange morning.

You know that feeling where you’re still half asleep and something in your general vicinity starts making sound and you don’t really register it as existing… You attribute it to something in your dream, but something about it seems somewhat persistent and it certainly doesn’t make any sense in the context of the dream… Then like crawling out of syrup you slowly realise that it’s not part of your dream at all, but is in fact very real… As I was realising this, it hits me suddenly that the sound is screaming. I sit up suddenly and whip the curtain open and look outside.

Remember at this point, if you will, I live on a horse farm. And bear in mind, people who keep their horses here help out from time to time with taking care of them if the people who normally do it can’t. Two such people are Joe and Stephanie. Ok.

Stephanie is laying on the ground, just inside one of the horse pastures, holding her face and screaming. The big grey horse she had apparently been leading is loose and running around like a psycho. Steph’s husband Joe is running from somewhere towards her. I leap out of bed and race down the stairs. In the midst of this, I hear my dad outside yelling “What!? What?!” As I’m flying down the stairs, my mom’s standing in the laundry room, and I holler to her on the way by, “Stephanie’s down and Petey’s loose!” and race out the door. Mind you, I’m wearing a pajama tank top, boxer shorts and no shoes. My dad’s on the cell phone, calling 911, Joe is tending to Stephanie, and the big stupid horse is still running around. So I decide to try to catch the horse.

Now under most circumstances, catching a horse usually isn’t that big of a deal. They’re not too hard to catch and once you get them, they’ll usually calm down. Petey’s stupid. So stupid. Stupid enough that you have to worry about getting seriously injured when handling him. (Stephanie. Case in point.)

So here’s me, only thinking in terms of logic, going after this huge stupid horse with no shoes on. PJ tank top and boxers. He ends up taking off down the side of the barn, so I’m racing after him on a gravel drive way running as fast as I possibly can. After he charges me a couple of times, I manage to trap him in one of the empty pastures. I get back up to where Steph and Joe are sitting, the adrenaline started to wear off and the pain started to set into my now very sore feet. My mom comes out and is talking to Joe and Steph. Turns out Steph had been leading the horse out to his pasture and he had reared up and kicked her in the face. Her nose was bleeding pretty badly, and by this point had lost quite a bit of blood and was laying down to keep her head from spinning. My mom was comforting her and telling her she’d be alright. Another one of the people who rides horses here shows up. As she’s driving up, she slows down and rolls down the window. She’s staring at us with this kind of confused look on her face. I walk over to her and tell her to keep moving because there’s ambulances and such on the way. She told me later that she was confused because we all looked so calm, just standing around, and she was wondering why we’d all be chatting around the pasture with Joe and Steph sitting on the ground. We told her later it was completely to keep Steph from losing it. My mom walks over to talk to someone else and Steph says something about how she was glad when my dad came running out but was relieved when my mom came out. “I just kept thinking, ‘Where’s Carol?’ because she’s a nurse and if she says I’m ok, then I’m ok.” My mom says later to someone else, “I’m just a psych-nurse, I don’t know anything about broken cheek bones. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.” Being that we live in the middle of nowhere, whenever there’s an emergency, all sorts of people show up. We ended up with two paramedics, two ambulances and one of the county K9 units in our back yard within about ten minutes. After asking all the questions and making sure she was alright to move, they loaded her up and took her to the hospital.

I’ve kept their dog for them. I sat up here for a while giving myself a chance to actually wake up like a normal person and to let the adrenaline completely wear off. Anyway… hopefully nothing terrible is wrong with her. A broken nose would definitely be better than a broken cheekbone.