Injured Rider Undaunted

For the past 13 years as a horse show competitor, Betsy Breen has ridden over six-foot fences and water jumps with grace and ease, earning a national reputation on the Grand Prix equestrian circuit.

As one of the top West Coast riders, the 24-year-old Laguna Beach resident has won hundreds of blue ribbons, has been named best rider at the Santa Anita Grand Prix and won the Grand Prix events at Del Mar and Santa Barbara.

Today, however, Betsy Breen is a patient in the rehabilitation unit at UCI Medical Center in Orange, the victim of a riding accident that left her in a coma for nine days and caused her to twice undergo brain surgery.

On July 20, in Estes Park, Colo., the day before a horse show, Breen was sitting on her French thoroughbred, Loaded Dice, talking to her trainer when the horse swung his head around to bite at a fly on his side.

Somehow, either the horse’s metal bit or rein became caught in Breen’s stirrup. The horse, nicknamed Frenchie, panicked and reared. Breen was thrown, landing on her head and suffering a skull fracture.

The slim, sandy-haired rider, who was wearing a riding helmet, was rushed to Estes Park Medical Center. She was stabilized and then flown by helicopter to Boulder Community Hospital, where she underwent two surgeries to remove blood clots on both sides of her brain.

After nine days in a coma and four weeks in the hospital, Breen was flown back to Orange County last Thursday and was admitted to UCI Medical Center, where she will undergo inpatient therapy for several weeks.

“She’s doing much better than five weeks ago,” said Breen’s mother, Carol, a registered nurse who owns Stoneridge Riding Club in Laguna Beach, where Betsy served as an unpaid assistant manager and instructor.

Memory Problems

In addition to receiving “great, really loving” medical care in Colorado, Carol Breen said, her daughter “has had an incredible bank of people praying for her.”

Betsy, who had partial paralysis on her right side after surgery, has regained full movement of her arm and leg. But while Betsy’s long-term memory is good, her short-term memory “is still fragile,” her mother said.

“With a head injury, they say it takes at least two years to have rehabilitation in all areas: physical and cognitive function,” Carol Breen said. “Her cognitive skills are where we’re going to need some work: speech and abstract thinking.”

She said her daughter still speaks slowly and has difficulty finding the word she wants.

Outlook Good

Betsy Breen is expected to continue outpatient rehabilitation therapy for as long as two years, but her doctors say her prognosis is good.

The rider, whose visitors are restricted to family and close friends, is eager to get back to the riding club.

“I have been in a hospital for seven weeks, and I want to go home,” Betsy told her friend, Joanne Reynolds, of Newport Beach. “I want to see Frenchie. He’s such a good boy. I had an accident on him, and I can’t ride for a long time, but I want to go home.”

Reynolds, a fellow rider who was in Colorado with Breen, said that to give Carol Breen some time away from the hospital, “a bunch of the women at Stoneridge Riding Club are taking turns spending the night with Betsy, so she’s not disoriented and panicky” when she awakes.

Fund Started for Breen

Betsy Breen’s friends are also helping her financially. Reynolds said about eight riders at the club have organized a fund called the Rehabilitation Help Fund to help pay Breen’s medical expenses. So far, they have raised $16,000 in individual donations and have contacted several Grand Prix corporate sponsors.

Although Stoneridge Riding Club sponsored the 11 local riders who were competing in Colorado, the riders travel and ride as individuals and must carry their own insurance, Breen said. Betsy, who had been included in her father’s coverage until she was 23, was uninsured.

“She just didn’t pick up her own insurance, and when you’re young, you think nothing is going to happen to you,” Carol Breen said. “She has fallen innumerable times but never got hurt.”

The purpose of the fund, Reynolds said, is to aid injured riders. “We hope to raise enough money for Betsy’s expenses and then turn (the fund) over to the American Horse Show Assn. and let them administer it . . . to anybody who is a member of the association and who has a need.”

Other Riders Injured

Reynolds said 1987 has not been a good year for riders.

“Some of the best riders in the country have suffered incredible injuries,” she said, citing George Morris, the 1984 Olympic equestrian team trainer, who fractured a vertebra in a riding accident, and Conrad Homfeld, the 1984 Olympic Silver medalist in stadium jumping, who broke his hip.

Such accidents, Reynolds said, “make you realize that even if you have insurance you still have thousands of dollars that one way or the other insurance isn’t going to cover.”

Reynolds said anyone interested in donating to the fund, can write to the Rehabilitation Help Fund, 375 Broadway, Suite 240, Laguna Beach, Calif. 92651. For more information, call (714)494-4644.

Although Carol Breen started the club 10 years ago because of her daughter’s talent, she had another motive.

“Jumping was something I wanted to do as a little girl, and I never got to do,” she said. “So I’ve had a very vicarious living experience through Betsy the past 13 years. I love to be around horses.”

Hunter-Jumper Competitor

So does her daughter, whose specialty is hunter-jumper riding. In the hunter riding events, she and her horse are judged on their form and grace as they negotiate a course of jumps. In the jumper events, they compete against the clock.

Betsy Breen is known as a determined competitor and a patient trainer.

“She wants to see her horses, and she wants to get back to the shows and the whole thing, but she also knows it’s going to be a while,” Carol Breen said.

The hardest thing for her daughter, she says, will be “being patient with herself” about getting well.