Kicked Into My Second Life
One Horse, Two Titanium Clips, and the 80% Nobody Talks About
“We're 20% of what happens in there. Your belief is the other 80%."
That is what my surgeon said to me, moments before he picked up the scalpel in the particular quiet of a pre-op room. He looked at me the way a person looks when they understand that the body in front of them is a whole soul.
That sentence defined my whole experience of being gifted this second life.
It was an ordinary Monday. I had gone out for a walk and a talk with our sweet but lame horse, Monty. We stopped for a short moment, and when I turned back toward him, he was covered in baby horse flies. Two seconds later, I felt the power of a small train throw me to the ground.
The budding grass came into view as I gasped for a sip of oxygen, just enough to sustain myself. And there was Monty, bolting and bucking across the field, his lead line waving behind him like a flag I had not meant to raise. He came to stand tall at the gate. Somehow, in excruciating pain, I managed to text the only words that felt true. Help. Monty Kicked me.
I hobbled back toward him, grabbed his rope, opened the gate, and hung on his nervous body as I walked him down the dirt road. Far enough that my trainer could hear me and run out to take him. The owner put me in her car. I had to argue with her, half out of my mind, that no, I could not drive myself to the small Nosara clinic.
The doctor at the clinic did the ultrasound and told me I would need to be rushed to the nearest hospital. Please get me a plane to San José, I begged. The answer came back quietly. We don't have time. I was loaded into the back of a Land Cruiser ambulance for the hour-long drive over the rugged, bumpy roads. I breathed consciously through every jolt with as much grace as I could gather, as I gazed at the ceiling of that ambulance. It suddenly hit me that I was riding in the same ambulance that I send blessings to each time I see it on the road. But could this really be happening?
I arrived an hour later at the underfunded and overcrowded hospital in Nicoya. They rolled me past bed after bed of patients without rooms, all the way into an operating room, where five women began cutting off my clothes. I turned to Dr. Alejandro, who had come with me all the way from Nosara, and asked him if I should call my mom and my girls. Was this the kind of moment where I was supposed to tell them that I loved them, just in case? He handed me his phone without a word.
Still, none of this felt real until I asked the surgeon if he could please go in laparoscopically. He answered me calmly and directly. No. I have a quiet, lifelong fear of being cut open, and so when the anesthesia ventilator was placed over my face, I took the deepest breath my ribs would allow, and I surrendered.
The next four days I slowly came back to life in the intensive care room of that public Costa Rican hospital. Only Spanish was spoken around me, which made me deeply grateful for the language I carry. Phones and personal belongings were not allowed. Fluorescent lights beamed down on me and the fifteen other patients who were healing alongside me.
I was so grateful for the nurse who would quietly sneak me her phone each day so I could hear Patrick’s voice, and the cloth that I would use to cover my eyes so I could bring my attention inward.
On the fourth day I was released. I fell into Patrick's arms and wept, letting all the bravery I had been holding melt away. It is amazing how strong we can be when there is no other choice.
Patrick had been guided by the community to take me directly to San Jose, where I could rest and heal close to great hospitals. When we arrived that night, I could tell that something was still not right. The next morning, I was admitted to the second hospital of the week, my body finally settling under a warmed blanket and the softness of a real pillow.
A CT scan revealed what we couldn’t have known before. Blood clots, a collapsing lung, and five broken ribs, two of them pointed like knives toward my lung, waiting for one wrong move to become fatal.
I was scared and unsure as they began to speak about another surgery. But this time was different. Three surgeons and the pulmonologist came into my room together, and we talked through every possibility. They took their time with me, because this time, I had time. They wanted me to feel completely held in my own choice.
And that is when Dr. William said it. It is twenty percent us. But it is eighty percent you.
We are taught, most of us, to hand our bodies over in moments like this. To believe that healing is something done to us, by people in white coats, with instruments we do not understand. And here was the person holding the instrument, telling me the truth I had spent my whole life teaching other women.
The body is not separate from what we believe about it. The body is not separate from who is holding it.
I have to tell you what happened on the other side of that anesthesia mask, because I am still trying to find words large enough to hold it. While I was being wheeled toward that second operating table, somewhere between this life and whatever comes next, my community back home in Nosara was opening a Sunday dance circle with me in their hearts. People I love were lighting candles in their kitchens. A Dr. Joe group was holding a healing circle, holding both me and the surgeons in the highest vibration they could call in. A prayer chain was holding my name like it was a fragile, sacred thing. Patrick was beside me, holding my hand the way he has held our whole life together. My mother and Patrick’s were in our home with our girls. A meal train was already forming before I was even out of surgery.
Being prayed for in my darkest hour was one of the most moving experiences I have been given to experience in this life. It was not the idea that people were praying, but the actual, embodied feeling of it. Hundreds of hands and hearts reaching for me across oceans and time zones, weaving a net underneath me that the surgeons could not see but I could feel. I have spent so many years teaching women about the unseen architecture of healing. I had never, until that morning, been the one carried by it.
That is the eighty percent.
What I keep returning to, now, is how easily I might have missed it. How easily any of us might. We live in a culture that worships the twenty percent and forgets the eighty entirely. We thank the doctors and forget those who lit the candles and prayed. We name the scalpel and forget the soup.
I want to name them, because they deserve to be named, and because none of us were ever meant to walk through our darkest hours alone. Patrick, who never once let go of my hand. My mama and Patrick's mama, who held our girls when I could not. Jaime and Paul, our neighbors, who showed up the way only true neighbors do. Pauline, who started the meal train and sang for me. Yali, who brought the meatballs blessed by her own chants. My sisters, who cried with me when I needed someone to cry with, fed me and took care of my children. And every single name in our Healed & Whole chat, every candle, every prayer, every dance, every soup. You did not just take care of me. You carried me. You held us through the hour I was most afraid I would not survive. And I am still, weeks later, undone by the gravity of being loved like that.
