03/11/2025
Many of you have heard or seen through the grapevine that I sold my farm and all of my horses. I had started drafting this post in May, but I just couldn’t post it. Since then, my outlook has changed from a depressing one to much more positive.
In early October of 2024, I woke up one morning with a lot of pain in my left shoulder blade. It felt like someone had stuck a knife near my shoulder blade. I assumed that I had tweaked a muscle lifting weights the day before and didn't think much of it. Long story condensed, the pain didn't go away, and after slogging through our health care system for months, it turns out that I was born with a congenitally fused C3/C4 (those are vertebrae in my upper neck). This fusion pushed the load and wear and tear on my neck down the neck, and my C5/C6 space was a mess. I had severe degenerative disc disease at C5/C6 along with foraminal stenosis at C5/C6. I experienced some nerve symptoms and weakness in my left arm and hand as a result. I had already lived with chronic pain in my neck for years.The doctors that I saw told me to stop the things that were aggravating my neck, namely riding. I had two different steroid injections done, one in December of 2024 and another in February of 2025, that seemed to relieve my nerve symptoms, although I still had neck pain. They told me to keep managing things with steroid injections, and to come back if something changed.
In August of this year, I woke up one morning with excruciating pain and could no longer function. I ended up in the ER that night. A week later, I got another steroid injection, and it took my pain from excruciating to a place where I could somewhat function. The doctors here had originally told me that when my pain wasn’t managed by steroids, they would do surgery. That turned out to not be the case. I had an appointment with the same surgeon who I had seen nearly a year earlier, and he said that he couldn’t help me, and he was going to refer me to a pain doctor. At this point, I had been basically living my life on the couch for about a month, and pain meds didn’t do anything for the pain. In the ER, I was on hydrocodone, va**um, and oxycodone, and it barely touched the pain. To have the steroid injection done, they gave me fentanyl, and I still could barely lie on the table to have the injection done even with fentanyl. There was a period of about a week where I literally could not sleep; no matter how tired I was, I could not fall asleep because the pain was so intense. After that, sleep came in only segments before the pain would wake me up again.
I left my appointment with the surgeon sobbing. I couldn’t imagine living my life like this. In desperation, I reached out to Stanford, and literally within about 15 minutes of reviewing my case, a surgeon offered me an appointment the next day. I flew down to see him, and he said that my primary problem had not been diagnosed. He believed that I had a herniated disc at C6/C7 that was causing my symptoms all along. He recommended a cervical disc replacement and he said that I could return to an active life again. He said that he wished that I hadn’t retired and sold my farm before I saw him. I walked out of that appointment crying tears of relief and hope. I’m not a crier, so that was a lot of tears in two days for me, going from soul crushing despair to elated hope.
I had surgery shortly after that, ironically one year to the day after my severe symptoms started. Dr Mok and his team were amazing. They performed a two level disc replacement (C5/C6 and C6/C7). I woke up from anesthesia with the stabbing nerve pain gone. I didn’t take a single pain med post op (not even anything over the counter), as the pain from surgery was nothing compared to the nerve pain that I had experienced. The day after surgery, I walked 5 miles, and I have been up and active ever since. Before surgery, Dr Mok had asked me my two goals for surgery, and I had said: 1) To be able to play with my 3 year old child again, and 2) To be able to lead an active life. I’m about 3 weeks post-op now, and I am really hopeful that I will be able to continue living these goals.
Last year, when I was in the throes of all of this, with the guidance of the doctors up here, I made the decision that riding horses, especially riding dressage horses, wasn’t a good idea. I want my neck to last another 55 years, and it only held up to 20+ years of dressage. I made the decision to sell my farm, which was crushing. I put my heart and soul into making the farm the best possible place for horses and humans that I could, and it choked me up to think of my future without horses and their wonderful human attendants in my backyard. For all of my dear friends at the farm, they know that this is not goodbye. I will still stay connected.
I sold all of my riding horses, which again, was a bit surreal for me. I reflect back on the wild ride that has been my journey as a professional trainer, and I'm flooded with so many emotions. I have loved horses all of my life, and that hasn't changed. It's funny, when I think of my best memories of riding and horses, they honestly come from my childhood and from my college days. I will always cherish the days that I spent with my childhood horses--hours spent grooming and caring for them, riding them alone on the wild trails behind my house, Pony Club camp and other antics (Katy, Jonathan, Brian, William, and Jen I'm sure that you will always remember those days as well). When I became a trainer, it forced me to regularly sell my beloved horses in order to have an income, which was always hard, but I viewed my time with them to be a gift, and I always hoped to find them a loving forever home.
I have made so many amazing friends through the horse world, and I would like to especially shout out to my PNW and CA horse friends. I was always under pressure to move to Florida or somewhere else to be closer to the high performance scene. I could never do it, in large part because of all of you. The PNW and CA are full of so many great people--I can't name you all, it would take pages. I have loved my experiences meeting so many people, and in the end, staying here and forgoing a career in high performance dressage was unequivocally worth it. The community that I have through the PNW is absolutely amazing. This is not a goodbye, dear friends, it is simply a new chapter. I hope to remain connected to all of you.
This isn't goodbye, and it's not the end. It's a new chapter, and that brings exciting new possibilities too. I'm a big believer in fixing the things that I can and moving on and around the things that I cannot change. I cannot change that I was born fused at C3/C4, so I can only make choices that work around that reality. I will stay connected with the horse world. I will still teach and clinic, and I am now able to prioritize teaching, as I won’t have my own riding taking precedence. I've dropped the threat to my husband that I might start an animal rescue, but he asked me to wait on that one, and it was serendipitous when an amazing horse rescue, SAFE, bought my farm. I hope to volunteer there and help take care of horses when I am able. I was an English major, so it might be time to put that to use. I am passionate about continuing education to provide better care and management of our beloved horses, and I am also passionate about sharing insights with professionals in the equine industry, as trainers are some of the hardest working people I know who give everything they have to often barely scrape by. I am working on developing a consulting service to industry professionals (and amateurs who want it too). I haven’t closed the door on riding again, but I need to take the time to heal and recover from surgery at this time.
With love and gratitude for all of my friends,
Alyssa
Photo is two days post op with my wonderful mom, who helped me while I was recovering from surgery.
