110 SIDELINES APRIL 2014
FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
Lara was the horse crazy girl
who participated in summer
camps, pony rides and took
formal English lessons as
often as possible. Lara ex-
plained, “My whole school
experience was distracted
by dreaming about horses,
and sketching them in the
margins of my notebooks.
I used to pour over horse
magazines, catalogs and
photo books. I read every
Black Stallion book, every
Marguerite Henry book and
anything at the library that
had a horse on the cover. I
spent every penny I had on
Breyer horses, until eventu-
ally I had over 100. Every-
one said it was a phase and I
would get over it, but I never
did.”
Lara rode as often as she
could, cleaning stalls for
lessons at a local barn and
eventually riding for people
who didn’t have time to ride
their own horses. In 1978,
she met a woman named
Jackie Thompson who al-
lowed Lara to ride her four
horses as often as she liked.
“I rode those horses all over
Northern Michigan where my
family had a lake cottage. I
often rode alone, but some-
times I took a friend and
we would ride through the
woods, orchards, dunes and
beaches. My favorite was to
take the horses swimming in
Lake Michigan and then go
galloping down the beach bareback. I rode Jackie’s horses from
1978 until she gave them to me in 1997. My favorite horse, Bitty,
died in 2007 when he was 27 years old. I started riding him when
he was two, and we were together from my 15th year until my
40th year.”
Around the same time that Lara and Jackie connected, Lara
decided to try her hand at eventing. She took both dressage
and show jumping lessons and participated in local shows. Her
equestrian career was put
on hold for four years while
she attended the University
of Michigan. After graduat-
ing with a degree in Natural
Resources and meeting her
now husband Dan, Lara got back into eventing.
Tragedy would strike while jumping a course as a thunderstorm
approached. Lara explained, “As the winds kicked up and the
horse tried to duck out of a seven-stride jump line, I corrected him
and made him jump. When we landed, the horse ducked his head
between his legs and started bucking like a bronco. The last thing
I remember was my instructor saying, “Hold on!” before I went
flying off and landed in a sitting position on the ground. I thought
I had broken my back and ended up taking an ambulance ride
to the hospital. Fortunately, I
only broke my left wrist and
my pelvis in three places. I
was on crutches for about a
month with a funny appara-
tus attached that let me put
the weight on my elbow in-
stead of on my broken wrist.
That was my first experience
with being disabled.”
Lara would continue rid-
ing after her eventing acci-
dent and in 2002 she moved
with her husband, son and
her horses from Jackie
Thompson to a remote part
of Wyoming – unknowing of
a life-altering event in her
future.
Hours after that 2006 ski-
ing accident in Denver, Lara
remembers how she felt. “It
was awful, like a really bad
dream. You think these kind
of things only happen to oth-
er people or in the movies. I
had to go through the griev-
ing process over the loss of
my right arm and my walking
abilities.”
Lara spent 24 days in the
hospital in Denver before
she could go home to Wyo-
ming. While there, she went
through intensive physical
therapy to learn how to walk
again. She also had to go
through occupational thera-
py to learn how to function
with only one hand. After
five weeks her bones and
lung were healed, but her arm
still hung off her shoulder like
a “floppy dead weight.” Even though her arm could no longer re-
ally feel anything, the phantom pains were unbearable 100% of
the day.
When Dan and Lara returned home to Wyoming, Dan started
researching treatments for brachial plexis avulsions. Even though
there is nothing they can do to reattach the nerves back into the
spinal cord, there were other options. They decided to go with
a highly recommended surgeon at the University of Utah named
Dr. Angela Wang, who per-
formed a very complicated
nerve transfer surgery.
The surgery had to be
done before six months had
passed or it would be too
late for the muscle to recover. On August 3, 2006, Lara had an
eight hour radical surgery that transferred one end of a trapezius
nerve to the top of her arm by the shoulder so that she could lift it
up and out away from her body. Then they peeled away one end
of an intercostal nerve (between her ribs), then stretched it up to
an incision through her armpit and down her arm to attach to her
bicep muscle. Because of the tearing of the nerve wall during this
process, it took nine months for the nerves to heal enough to tell
“It took me several years before I could
really embrace the fact of how lucky it
was that I could even walk at all.”
Lara and Slate with Steffen Peters at a clinic.
Photo Courtesy of Lara Oles
Continued on page 112
