This is NOT the topic of my post, but I had to share it. It kinda made my ego puff up and I saw glitter floating in the air. 🙂

This is on my agent’s blog. I want to steal “pony-crazed glitter princess” and put it in my bio.

Jessica Burkhart is the pony-crazed glitter princess responsible for the awesome-tastic tween series CANTERWOOD CREST, the chapter book series UNICORN MAGIC, and she’s got lots more super-cool stuff coming soon!

~*~*~

Okay, so the REAL post . . . every year about this time I think about where I was. I was living in Dieterich, Illinois, which was close to Effingham and I had SUPER bad scoliosis. I was scheduled to have FREE surgery at Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis in mid-November. I had the worst case of scoliosis the hospital had ever seen. They were nervous about my operation and paralysis was a real risk.

Here’s my thirteen year old spine:

Not good, right? It was pressing on my heart and lungs and getting worse every few months. Without the surgery, I would die.

I maintained the same thought: I WOULD rather keep riding horses until I couldn’t and then die.

I thought my life was over at thirteen years old. My dreams of equestrian success were going to evaporate the moment I checked into the hospital.

The barn was my life. I rode my Tennessee Walker/Saddlebred, Sallie. She was a gorgeous strawberry roan who was a little wild and a lot of fun. I bred Sallie to a black Arabian and months later was gifted a stunning albino filly–Misty.

I was there for the birth and I had my hands on Misty moments after she was born as I did the imprint training that I’d studied while waiting for her to arrive.

With Sallie resting, I hacked horses for Pam, the barn owner. The oldest horse was an appaloosa named AJ. He was a breeze to ride. Then I’d ride Kabo–a smaller appaloosa with gorgeous black and white markings. Kabo was high strung and full of energy–two of my favorite qualities in a horse. I loved a challenge. My favorite horse to ride was a bay Arabian gelding who was over 17 hands high. His name was Blue because of mysterious blue dot on his white blaze. He was the most gentle horse that I’ve ever met.

If I wasn’t hacking, I was training Misty, helping gentle an adopted mustang, trying to make friends with an angry copper chestnut stallion, and switching back and forth between English and Western to grow as a rider.

Once Misty was a yearling, I bred Sallie again to the black Arabian–Max. This time, she had a stunning chestnut filly that I named Princess Spice. (I was/am a huge Spice Girls fan! :))

It was in the middle of weaning Princess that I had to swap breeches for a hospital gown.

After 9 hours in surgery, I woke up three inches taller, missing a rib and full of two 12-inch rods and a bunch of screws.

It looked like this:

This x-ray is one year after my surgery. I spent two weeks in the hospital and was released on Thanksgiving Day of November 2000. I escaped with only a handful of numb spots on my right side. Being able to breathe was amazing! One of my lungs, actually, was so used to being squished by my spine that it collapsed in the hospital. Take a bendy straw, bend it tight and try to breathe through it. That’s what it felt like. Doctors couldn’t reinflate my lung, so I travelled by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Soon, I was all right again.

Physically, I was healing. Mentally, I was broken. I sold Misty, Sallie, and Princess and my family moved away from the stable that had been in my back yard. It took six years before I dreamed up Canterwood Crest and knew that I had to tell Sasha’s story.

One door in my equestrian life closed, but a different one opened.

Years later . . .

On October 17, 2012, I posted this on my blog:

“There have been a lot of positive (and some negative) comments in the media recently about Lady Gaga’s Body Revolution. In short, the movement is about loving and accepting your body exactly the way it is. Many people are posting their own shots on LittleMonsters.com. I wasn’t “born this way,” but I’m proud of how I now look.”

I posted this photo along with the above:

The cliche, but true message of this post? Something may end in your life, but it doesn’t mean that thing is over. Fight for what you want. Find a way to make it work. I know you can do it.

xoxo