Courtney King Dye

THE EDITORS OF PRACTICAL HORSEMAN PRESENT
Courtney
King Dye:
MAKING
LEMONADE
two years after a traumatic brain injury,
this dressage Olympian is more inspiring
than ever before.
Courtney and Roxy, the first
nontherapy dressage horse she
rode after her accident
W
e’ve all heard the saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” but Courtney King Dye takes it to a whole new level. Her proverbial “lemonade stand” would make the Fortune 500.
In 2010, by age 32, Courtney had already accomplished more
than most dressage riders ever dream of doing. She’d represented the
United States at FEI World Cup Finals in 2007 and 2008 on Christine McCarthy’s Dutch
This article originally appeared in the
September 2012 issue of PRACTICAL HORSEMAN
© istockPhoto.com/BochkareV PhotograPhy
© susan J. stickle
By elizabeth iliff Prax
September 2012 • Practical Horseman
29
© Susan J. Stickle
courtesy, courtney king dye
ABOVE: Courtney and Harmony’s ­Mythilus
competed on the U.S. team at the 2008
Olympics in Hong Kong.
© fotolia.com/Malyshchyts Viktar
LEFT: Staying positive after her accident
and “making lemonade,” Courtney began
­hippotherapy on 14-year-old Dude.
­ armblood stallion Idocus. She’d ridden
W
on the U.S. team at the 2008 Olympics in
Hong Kong with the Dutch Warmblood
gelding Harmony’s Mythilus, owned by
Harmony Sporthorses. She had a barnful
of horses in training and owners offering
to buy her potential mounts for the 2012
Olympics. A hard-working professional
who’d supported her career in the early
years by babysitting and painting horse
portraits, Courtney had just been chosen
as the 2010 recipient of the $25,000
­Carol Lavell Advanced Dressage Prize,
which would help to cover expenses in
her bid for the next Olympics.
But her plans came to a screeching
halt the afternoon of March 3, 2010, at
her training barn in Loxahatchee, Florida.
Her assistant trainer, Jennifer Marchand,
remembers the day well. She’d been
watching Courtney school a client’s horse,
a well-behaved 6-year-old schooling First
Level. “He was cantering on the right lead,
and I was thinking that he looked really
good,” Jennifer says. “Courtney actually
commented, ‘He’s accepting the half-halts
really well.’ Then, as they came out of a
corner, it looked like his back feet just got
tangled up, like one stepped on top of the
other. Then he just tipped over.”
30
The horse got up immediately,
­ nharmed. But Courtney didn’t move.
u
Jennifer rushed to her side and found
that she was breathing. “I took her hand
and said, ‘Courtney, squeeze my hand
if you can hear me.’ She didn’t respond.
I called 911, and the paramedics were
there within 10 minutes.”
Meanwhile, Courtney’s longtime mentor, Lendon Gray, was waiting for her to
arrive at the showgrounds of the nearby
Palm Beach Dressage Derby CDI-W. “I
was standing in the middle of a field, sort
of stomping my foot because she was
late,” Lendon remembers. “She was supposed to be coming there to work with
me. By the time they got word to me and
I got to the hospital, there was a whole
crew of people there.”
Courtney’s best friend, Betsy Tyler,
was among the crowd at the hospital
awaiting news of the fallen rider’s condition. Courtney’s husband, Jason, who was
at their home in Connecticut, had called
Betsy to tell her about the accident. “And
I was thinking, ‘She’s going to be pissed!’”
recalls Betsy. “She had horses in the Derby, and the Lavell scholarship was ­going
to be presented there. She had a lot of
good stuff going on! We didn’t have any
Practical Horseman • September 2012
idea the s­ everity of the accident until we
got there.”
Doctors soon determined that Courtney had suffered a traumatic brain injury.
She had not been wearing a helmet, and
the impact of her head on the ground had
crashed her brain against the inside of her
skull. The trauma caused a shearing injury
on all four lobes of her brain, disrupting
individual nerve cells (neurons) and causing loss of connections among them. This
is similar to the damage resulting from
shaken baby syndrome.
The next several days were touch and
go. “I was very lucky that my brain didn’t
swell enough to need surgery,” Courtney
says. She did not regain consciousness,
however, for nearly four weeks.
Jason flew down the evening of the
accident, and as soon as doctors gave the
OK, he organized an around-the-clock
schedule to ensure that a friend or family member was always at his wife’s side.
“Betsy, Lendon and my siblings all took
shifts,” says Courtney. “Lendon took the
wee-hours shift.”
Signs of Hope
While Courtney was deep in the coma,
says Lendon, “We just kept trying to do
Speaking Up for Safety
Because of Courtney’s accident, safety awareness in dressage at all levels
has grown internationally. As she says, “My accident is proof to everyone
that safety has nothing to do with level of skill. My slogan is ‘expect the
­unexpected.’ The quietest old schoolmaster can trip and fall.”
After attending the World Equestrian Games in 2010, Courtney began
endorsing new helmet rules for dressage. She explains, “The number of
people who recognized me and how many idolized the team made me
realize that top riders are role models. Everyone looks up to them and looks
to them for what is right. Wearing a helmet should be required.”
Since then, she has given multiple speeches advocating helmet use,
endorsing the work of, among other groups, Riders4Helmets and the
­Equestrian Aid Foundation, which assists horsepeople suffering from lifethreatening illness and catastrophic injuries.
She also supported the new U.S. Equestrian Federation safety-helmet
rules that went into effect on March 1, 2011, almost exactly a year after
her accident. (Go to www.PracticalHorsemanMag.com for a synopsis of
the rules.)
Several riders have already credited Courtney for inspiring them to wear
helmets that may have saved their lives in subsequent falls, including top
riders Guenter Seidel, Liz Austin and Debbie McDonald. Courtney writes,
“If my accident saves one life, it makes it all seem worthwhile.”
letters and spell what I wanted to say,” she
remembers. “My sister asked me why I
used such big words, and I responded that
I wanted them to know I wasn’t stupid.
My favorite saying became, ‘My brain may
be screwed up, but my mind is fine.’”
Spotty at first, Courtney’s memory
soon came back as well, although she
still doesn’t remember the last three days
before the accident “or, thankfully, the
­accident itself,” she adds.
Long, Slow Recovery
Since coming out of the coma, Courtney
has had to retrain her brain to communicate with her body correctly, at first to do
the most basic things, like eating, speaking
and walking. She is tackling her recovery
with the same determination that carried
her to the Olympics, packing her days full
of therapy sessions—speech, physical, occupational, even aqua. And, just as she would
with her horses, she has experimented
with everything from a h
­ yperbaric chamber, electrostimulation and neurofeedback
to acupuncture. She also uses pottery-
making and painting for therapy.
Because Courtney is right-handed and
her right hand is so weak, she says, “Lefty
[her left hand] has to help a great deal,
but it’s good therapy to get Righty [her
right hand] involved.” She’s even adapted
her own form of “retail therapy,” using
shopping carts for balance to assist her
walking and exercising Righty by lifting
items into the cart with it.
Even so, she says two years after the
accident, “progress is unbearably slow.”
Because her balance and coordination are
so fragile, she needs help doing ­almost
September 2012 • Practical Horseman
© fotolia.com/nikitos77
anything that might jog her awareness.”
She brought in a pair of reins and put
them in Courtney’s hands. This wasn’t
easy with her right hand, which had developed a tendency to clench tightly into
a fist. “I was able to open her hand and
she grasped the rein,” says Lendon. “At
first, there was total resistance to the rein.
Then gradually she allowed me to move
her arm as a horse would.”
Bending the hospital rules a little, Jason
and Courtney’s friends also found a way
to bring her in contact with her beloved
dachshund, Viva. Betsy says, “The girls
would bathe Viva at the barn, and I’d
pick her up and meet Jason in the parking
lot. He’d quickly put her into a bag and
sneak her into the ICU. Apparently, when
Courtney touched Viva, even though
she was in a coma, she traced her finger
­between her eyes and along her head.”
By day 15, Courtney was opening her
eyes, but it was another 10 days before
doctors proclaimed her out of the coma,
yet still only minimally conscious. “It’s
not like in the movies, where they’re in a
coma for six years and then one day they
wake up and they’re normal,” says Lendon. “Coming around to consciousness is
a long process.”
During this process, doctors evaluated
the extent of the brain injury. Both Courtney’s right and left sides were affected,
“but the right is far, far worse,” Courtney
says. “My right arm was a completely useless appendage. Over time, it’s become
minimally useful, but it still can barely
do anything. Spasticity causes it to clamp
against my side like a wing. My right leg
refuses to bend.” Her balance was also
­seriously impaired and, later, scar tissue
was discovered in her left rib cage and
right shoulder. “It was caused by hitting
the ground but exacerbated from lying still
in the coma,” she says.
Courtney’s speech was also severely
impacted. Initially, she couldn’t make a
sound at all, then she had trouble forming
words. But that didn’t stop her from proving to everyone that her mental abilities
were fully intact. “My siblings brought me
a spelling board so I could point to the
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Courtesy, Courtney King Dye
ABOVE: Courtney paints as part of her
therapy. One of her pieces is a painting of
Ravel she made for Steffen Peters.
© Susan J. Stickle
LEFT: Courtney rides Roxy with assistance from (from left) her assistant trainer
­Jennifer Marchand, her working student,
Koryn Staehling, and leader Melvin Yanes
Cordero. Now she can ride on her own at
the walk, though she still needs assistance
when trotting.
everything. At first, she couldn’t get
dressed, shower or go to the bathroom
without help. Retraining her right leg to
walk in step with her left is also incredibly challenging. Betsy explains, “She has
to think about a million things that go
into one step—shifting the weight, lifting
the heel, pulling the toes forward, bending the knee, moving the hip.” Courtney
progressed to walking on her own with
a cane in early 2011, nearly 11 months
after the accident.
About a month after that, she was finally able to go to the bathroom on her own.
“That was my most notable achievement,”
she says. “Everything else is still a work in
progress. I still cannot walk without aid,
either from a cane or a person. I’d say I
have 15 percent use of my right arm and
hand. My left is about 90 percent. I wear a
brace on my right hand at night to prevent
it from clamping so tight as to cause pain.”
32
Throughout this grueling experience, Courtney’s enduring optimism has
amazed even her closest friends, who’d
always known her to be a positive person.
“I’m just in awe of the way she’s handled
it,” says Lendon. “It was a privilege to be
a part of her journey as she became an
­international rider. But I think, even more
so now, I feel privileged to be a part of
her current journey.”
From the very beginning, the entire
dressage community rallied to show support for Courtney. Three weeks after the
accident, she’d already received more
than 1,000 emails from well-wishers.
“There was mail from all over the world,”
says Betsy. “It came to my house, and I
would take bagfuls of it to her family.”
Donations rolled in to her medical fund
and, later on, when her therapy treatments exceeded her insurance caps,
friends put on more fundraisers for her.
Practical Horseman • September 2012
Overwhelmed by all of this generosity, Courtney expressed her thanks over
and over on her website blog (www.­
ckddressage.com). Typing one-handed with
her good hand, Lefty, she still shares her
experiences with a sense of humor and
­eloquence. For example, she explained her
speech challenges in the blog: “Sometimes
when I’m saying difficult words, I just feel
like my tongue is this big, gobby blob in
my mouth going wherever it wants.”
In reteaching herself to walk, Courtney wrote that her physical therapist “has
me keep my knees bent and try to keep
my upper body as still as possible, which
­engages hip swing. I’ve been practicing this
when walking, and I call it my ‘sexy walk.’
It’s amazingly similar to my gangster walk—
only the facial expressions vary quite a bit.
I look very menacing in my gangster walk
and oh, so sultry in my sexy walk. The
camo cane really pulls them both off!”
Getting Back
on the Horse
Several months after the accident, Courtney began hippotherapy, which utilizes
the horse’s movement to improve motor function. She wrote, “At first I didn’t
think I would ride again, partly because
my neurologist said if I hurt my head
again, it will not be two times as hard to
come back but five times; and I can tell
you, it’s not easy now! But I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
After her first ride, she wrote, “I was
more nervous than before I rode in the
Olympics!” Her first mount, Dude, was
a 14-year-old liver chestnut whose past
career had been as a fence closer on a
cattle ranch. When Dude stopped by the
arena door, Courtney instinctively kicked
him (with her left leg). She wrote, “He
very obediently ignored my pathetic onelegged kick! I was mortified, but it caused
a good laugh!”
With the assistance of three people—
one person leading the horse and one
on each side to correct her balance if
she slipped—Courtney continued regular
hippotherapy sessions. By October 2010,
though, she realized that she wouldn’t be
able to accomplish her first big goal of
riding one of her horses (training horses
owned by her clients) before her birthday
in November. In typical fashion, though,
after writing in her blog that this made
her sad, she switched to the positive: “I
realized I’m very lucky. I’m the only one
who cares if I meet my goal. I’m so lucky.
I know all my family and close friends
don’t care at all.”
“That’s the way she works,” says Lendon. “If she doesn’t reach a goal, fine.
She makes another one.” What matters,
Lendon says, “isn’t so much reaching the
goal as the journey trying to get there.”
Courtney has also resumed teaching.
At first, she taught only Jennifer and her
working student, Koryn Staehling, who
also soon began helping Courtney with
her self-devised therapy. Courtney found
teaching to be great speech therapy. “My
initial fear was that by the time I got
out what I wanted to say, the necessary
­ oment would have passed,” she says. “I
m
slowly began to trust that I was completely comprehensible and quick enough.
Now I teach other people, too.”
With Courtney’s guidance, Jennifer
brought two young training horses up
to Prix St. Georges/Intermediaire I, something she’d never done before. “That was
great for me,” Jennifer says. “As a teacher,
she’s just as brilliant as ever.”
Meanwhile, Courtney was learning
to view her own physical challenges
with more patience and understanding.
“Patience with myself has never been
my forte,” she wrote in her blog, “but I
finally accepted that, in this race, I am the
tortoise.” Lendon reminded her how long
it took to teach her Olympic partner,
Mythilus, the rudimentary basics. “Right
now, I have to relearn the basics, too.
And rushing it never helps.”
In another entry, she wrote, “I’ve always been realistic about the possibilities
of making it to major competitions, that
the stars had to be in the right alignment.
I want to be as realistic about my recovery as I was about competitions. At first I
didn’t want to acknowledge full recovery
may not happen, but I don’t want to
lead anyone on, not even myself. I know
I may not make a full recovery, and I
know from my joy of teaching that I’d be
content if I didn’t, but I will try as hard as
I can to make it.”
New Horizons
More than a year after the accident,
Courtney rode a regular dressage horse
for the first time, a pinto Dutch Warmblood mare nicknamed Roxy, owned
by Carol Cohen. She wrote later on her
blog, “I have to admit, I was a tiny bit
nervous getting on a nontherapy horse.
But she was a gem, acted like she’d been
doing it all her life.”
Initially, Courtney needed three assistants the entire time she was on a horse.
Now, she can ride on her own at the
walk, although she still needs the assistants when trotting. She also began taking
lessons again with Lendon, who says, “It’s
been fascinating for me. Here’s someone
who totally knows, but her body doesn’t
do what it’s told. She has almost no use
of her right leg—if she gets it to go at all,
it’s sort of a ‘thunk’—and very little use
of her right arm. And when she feels
balanced, she’s actually very much off to
one side. So we just keep experimenting and adapting, trying to find ways for
her to feel that what is actually is what
is—and to explain to the horse what her
one-sided aids are saying.”
In fall 2011, Courtney decided to
look into para-equestrian competitions.
After going through the process that
classifies riders in terms of their physical
limitations, she said, “I was impressed
with how detailed and fair the grading
is. None of it is done on the horse at
all. They have physical tests for balance,
strength and coordination of each limb
and the trunk. For instance, they put a
mat with large dots on it on the ground,
and you have to touch each one in order
with increasing speed with each foot.”
After that testing, followed by a
­required retesting this spring, Courtney
was placed in the walk-only level (1a).
The next challenge was to find a competition horse—easier said than done.
Courtney’s ideal mount is “that very rare
combination of sensitive and unflappable.” She needs a horse who will tolerate
her spastic right leg (which she affectionately calls “Thumper”), yet still respond to
her aids in a way that produces a round
frame, great gaits and correct test figures.
Para riders are allowed certain dispensations. For example, says Courtney,
“If riders have trouble shortening their
reins, they’re allowed to lean forward
September 2012 • Practical Horseman
33
Courtesy, Courtney King Dye
© Susan J. Stickle
© Susan J. Stickle
ABOVE: In addition to riding, Courtney has resumed teaching. She has helped
her assistant trainer, Jennifer Marchand, bring two young training horses up to
Prix St. Georges/Intermediaire I.
TOP RIGHT: Courtney’s husband, Jason, Courtney and her beloved dachshund, Viva
RIGHT: Courtney successfully competed in a qualifying show for the 2012 Paralympic
­selection trials last April on a borrowed horse, Nicolai.
and give all the way for free walk, so they
don’t have to lengthen the reins.” Otherwise, she says, the judging is identical to
able-bodied dressage. To be competitive
­internationally, that means the horses
must have the same quality of gaits as
horses in top-level, able-bodied dressage.
In her search for a horse possessing both quality gaits and the ideal
­temperament, Courtney thought she
found a partner in a horse nicknamed
Buddy. She asked Jane Clark, a sponsor of many Olympians who hadn’t yet
owned a Paralympic horse, if she would
like to buy him. Later in her blog, she
wrote, “To my absolute shock and bliss,
she said, ‘That sounds like fun!’” Courtney decided to change Buddy’s show
name to Make Lemonade.
When Buddy arrived at her barn,
Courtney wrote, “The first thing I did was
groom him (go, Righty, go!). I warned
him that it may hurt a little bit, but he
34
didn’t move a muscle, just stood like a
very cheerful statue! It was so great to be
able to give his neck a full-on hug, something I haven’t dared to do with another
horse in over two years.”
At the end of April, while Buddy settled into his new home, Courtney flew to
Houston to compete in a qualifying show
for the 2012 Paralympic Selection Trials,
her first competition since the accident.
On a borrowed horse, Nicolai, owned
by Andrea Hart and nicknamed “Saint
Nick,” she scored high enough in all three
required tests to qualify for the trials—and
won the freestyle to boot! Afterward, she
wrote in her blog, “This whole experience
has been amazing … humbling, invigorating, fun. It’s as if doctors said, ‘Clear!’ and
shocked my heart into beating.”
More Lemonade
Unfortunately, when Courtney came
home to begin riding Buddy, it soon
Practical Horseman • September 2012
became apparent that he wouldn’t be
suitable for the U.S. Paralympic selection
trials. “He didn’t do anything wrong,” she
says. “He just learned I couldn’t kick him,
so he’d stop or go sideways, very quietly giving me the finger. He just didn’t
know what to do with me. I can imagine
a horse’s perplexity. In some ways, I’m
good and they know I can ride, and at
the same time, I’m spazzy and more
confusing than the most basic beginner.
It takes a very rare temperament to make
sense of me.”
Abandoning her quest for this year’s
Paralympics, Courtney and Jane decided
to donate Buddy to a school. But, as
always, Courtney perseveres. With Jennifer’s help, she’s horse-hunting once again.
Jennifer says, “We’re learning that we
need to try them for a long time before
we decide.”
Ever positive, Courtney declares, “I’m
still going to make lemonade.”