When I was eighteen, I fell off a horse and fractured my vertebrae in three places. The accident happened in Islamabad when I was visiting my family, after my first year of college. A few years earlier, when I went to middle school in Islamabad, my older sister Puchi and I used to ride horses regularly.

A few years had passed since I had been on a horse and I was feeling, well, not so confident in my  riding abilities. So when Puchi asked me if I wanted to go horseback riding, I reluctantly said, “Um, okay.”

When we got to the riding club, my insecurity was confirmed. “I’m not feeling comfortable on this horse,” I told my sister. So I suggested we just ride around the ring on this first day back in the saddle. At first Puchi seemed agreeable, but after a few minutes of going round and round the ring, she must have gotten bored and off she went. And my horse followed. We rode along the outskirts of the city on riding trails. My horse galloping at various moments trying to keep up with Puchi and her beast. I cursed her the entire ride. And tried to hang on to my horse for dear life.

We were just ending our ride, at a slow trot, about fifty or so yards away from the Club, when I lost my balance. In that second, I made the decision to let go and fall. I sort of remember thinking, lots of people fall off a horse at some point. It will be okay.

And thud. I hadn’t noticed that we were crossing over pavement and I hit the concrete with force. Screaming, all the way down.

After I fell,  Puchi got off her horse and walked over to where I was lying flat on my back on the concrete walkway. “Oh, get up,” she said, sounding a bit annoyed with me.

But I couldn’t. Eventually, I mustered the strength to roll over and pick myself up slowly, all the while in excruciating pain. I somehow managed to put myself in the backseat of a Suzuki that was smaller than the Chevrolet Chevette that we had at my parents house in Connecticut. I’m not really sure an ambulance was even an option let alone a simple call to 911. We were in Pakistan.

We drove to the hospital. I managed to get out of the car and made my way inside after climbing up a steep flight of steps, holding my lower back with my hand and staggering up slowly. Having lived in the US for most of my life, with the exception of junior highschool and these somewhat infrequent visits, I was having a hard time understanding why a hospital would have a flight of steps at its entrance. It was 1986, surely the Pakistani medical community had heard of handicap access ramps?

Then came the x-rays. I had to lift myself onto the x-ray table and while I was lying there, I noticed that the machine had wheels which were tied up. That was about when the medical staff asked me to move over a half of an inch. I think of myself as a generally polite person, but in that moment, I lost it. “Move over a half an inch? You want me to move over a half an inch? Do you know how difficult that is for me? Why don’t you untie the wheels and move the x-ray machine a half an inch. That’s why it has wheels.” All of this was said in English, because my Urdu was not very good. Certainly not good enough to express this kind of frustration. 

They ignored me. Then came the stretcher to take me up to my hospital room. It was about an inch higher than the x-ray table so they asked me if I could please get up on the stretcher. ” You mean, it’s not collapsible?” I cried, incredulous. “Stretchers are meant to be collapsible. That’s the whole point!” They continued to ignore me.

The hospital room was another disaster, as far as I was concerned. For starters, the room was carpeted. Sure it made for a cozier space, “But what about the germs? How can you keep this room sterile if it’s carpeted?” I asked the nurse. She smiled at me, not answering my question. Then she left the room.

That was when I saw a wasp buzzing around my room. I have an irrational fear of wasps, so I started desperately looking for the call button and realized it was behind my head on the wall. I couldn’t reach it. Another flaw. I covered myself in the bed sheet from head to toe to protect myself from the wasp. Fuming. X-ray machines with wheels that don’t move. Carpeted rooms. A call button I can’t reach. And surely the wasp didn’t come from out of nowhere. Was there a wasps nest outside the window?

By now, my mother had been phoned and arrived around the same time the doctor came to pay me a visit. He confirmed that I had fractured my vertebrae and would need to be hospitalized for a few weeks until the swelling went down enough so that they could put on a cast.

“If all I can do is lie here, can’t I just go home and lie in bed?” By now I had complained so much, that finally, exasperated, the doctor, said, “Fine. Go.”

That’s when I realized I could not get out of bed, much less walk. And so I resigned myself to the fact that I would be bed-ridden in the carpeted hospital room. Full of germs. “And if I have to stay here, so do you,” I told Puchi. “You’re the one that made me get on that horse.”

The nurse brought a bed pan so they could take a urine sample. And then I heard some commotion in the hallway. “There’s blood in her urine,” the doctor said to my mother in a hushed tone. “She may be paralyzed for the rest of her life.”

And my mother’s response? “That’s no way to live. Put her down.” As if I were a horse. Fortunately Puchi overheard this conversation and said, “She has blood in her urine because she has her period.” You’d think the nurses would have communicated this when they saw the “sanitary napkin” I was forced to wear. My mother disapproved of tampons.

I have often wondered what was going through my mother’s mind when she said “put her down.” We had a good relationship. I was the studious, responsible, youngest child with good manners who had learned not to give her too much trouble. I’m sure she did not want me dead. Did she think she was sparing me the pain of living with a disability? Did she think they would actually carry out that kind of request?

Puchi spent the night with me, and every night that followed. Rather happily too. I think she was being considerate… and I think she was motivated by the handsome doctor who supplied her (and me) with valium. And that because my mother refused a stronger pain killer. “She’ll get addicted.”