Linda Hughes:  Riding Beyond the Sunset

By Eddie Donnally

 

For jockeys, split-second accidents far too often change their lives forever.  On Dec. 1, 1998 a rival’s mount veered out in front of Linda Hughes’s horse in a race at Calder Race Course. Her mount clipped heels and fell. The 18 years since have been spent in a wheelchair. A huge change for sure.  But not all for the worse.

Today, she still finds joy in riding her aging Quarter Horse  and fulfillment in teaching children, including those with traumatic brain injuries how to ride.  “The accident taught me much about myself and about life,” she said. “I used to see a woman who was a quadriplegic beside the saddling paddock every time I rode. I could never bring myself to talk to her. But that same woman visited me in the hospital after the accident and we became friends.  I always knew that an accident like mine was a possibility when I was riding but I never allowed myself to think about it.”

In a five year career, she rode 1,634 races won 122 on mounts earning over $1 million. She grew up in Rupert, Idaho and got her first job walking hot horses at Philadelphia Park. She groomed horses for three years, and exercised horses another three before she rode her first race at River Downs. She was the meeting’s leading apprentice and won the track’s Rodney Dickens Award, given for sportsmanship and ability.

As is often the case, she remembers little about the spill that severed her sixth vertebrae. “I woke up in the helicopter as it was taking off, threw myself up and then didn’t wake up again until five days later,” she said. Taken to the trauma center at the University of Miami and placed on a ventilator to assist her breathing the regained consciousness when doctors deemed it save to remove the breathing tube.  “Fortunately I have use of my arms,” she said. “A couple of vertebrae higher and I would have been a quadriplegic. Here I am today, lucky to even be alive.”  

She was able to buy a five acre farm with an eight stall barn about 45 minutes from the track. “But I don’t know how I would survive without the funds from PDJF (Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund),” she said. “If I didn’t have that money to count on, I would worry all the time. That money is super important to me.”   

 She has friends and family who live nearby and the place has a small mobile home she rents, usually to a “down on his luck racetracker.”  She raises chickens and gives away most of their eggs. She has dogs and cats and a 31 year-old Quarter Horse, Tally. Each day she rides the former show horse, using a regular saddle and a special mounting station. She encourages others to bring disabled children, some with brain injuries for her personal therapeutic riding programs. Linda helps them generate the trust they need to mount and ride.

Linda hopes to turn the small ranch into a therapeutic riding center for use by children’s charities. “I’ve spent almost everything I have building all we need for this,” she said. “I just need one able-bodied assistant.”    

She has overcome many of the health issues inherent in paraplegia, and is largely self-sufficient. Her home has lowered counters and an elevator to her loft bedroom. The arms she uses each day to get in and out of her wheelchair have biceps that belong on a body builder.

 Yet, five years after her fall, she underwent Neobladder Surgery. This required removing her appendix to make a path for a tube to her belly button. This allows her to catheterize there, something she said is far superior to other type catheters most para and quadriplegics use.  She also suffered a bout with pressure sores that required weeks of wound care in a hospital. Pushing her chair for 18 years has caused joint damage to her hands and she receives regular injections to relieve the pain.

“The anniversary day of my injury used to be a bad day,” she said. ”But now I hardly notice. The first five years were the hardest and I cried every day. I was in denial for years. Even now when friends come over and they want to see the pictures of me in silks, I get teary eyed.

“Racing was my entire life and I left that beneath a horse.  But the things I thought were important, I discovered weren’t very important at all.  When you’re a jockey your body is everything to you. But I learned that what you have inside is what really counts.  And you just have to learn to find a way to live in peace with your new normal.”