Manitoba woman in coma after being thrown from horse

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This article was published 19/06/2018 (2130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A GoFundMe page has been started for a young female rider from Winnipeg, who was thrown from her horse Sunday and has not regained consciousness.

Rebecca Fentum-Jones, 22, was riding at a horse-rescue ranch, where she is a volunteer, near St. Malo, 80 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg. She had ridden the horse before and was on an outing with the ranch owner.

On the way back, they were coming out of a ditch to cross a hardtop road when the horse stumbled and threw Fentum-Jones over its shoulder. She landed on the pavement, on her unprotected head.

A fellow rider, who is a critical care nurse, was able to assess the situation and bypass the usual paramedic diagnosis and get a STARS air ambulance directly to the scene. The helicopter landed on the road, and transported Fentum-Jones to Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg.

She has not regained consciousness, and is on a respirator and deeply sedated. She was placed in an induced coma due to the swelling of her brain. Doctors said the swelling could continue for three to four days after the trauma, her mother, Alison Fentum, told the Free Press.

She said her daughter has probably been given more medicine the past few days than she’s had in her life. “She’s just a tiny little peanut who never really takes medication,” she said Wednesday. Fentum-Jones, who is 5-5 and weighs about 120 pounds, is her only child.

The GoFundMe webpage, set up by friend Leona Stahl, said Fentum will likely have to quit her job to take care of her daughter.

Fentum has been in the horse business for most of her life, most prominently as an exercise rider of racehorses. She worked at racetracks across North America for 20 years. Now, in her 50s, she is trying to stay out of the industry by taking a sales manager job in clothing, so she can “get a normal life.”

On Monday afternoon, Fentum-Jones had surgery to remove part of her skull from both sides of her head to ease pressure on her brain.

No one knows what the outcome will be at this time, and neither is there a time frame. She had a magnetic resonance imaging exam Tuesday to determine whether she had suffered non-survivable trauma.

“They said they didn’t see anything that qualified as non-survivable,” Fentum said.

“It feels like it’s gone really fast, and it feels like it’s been three years in three days.”

She said doctors have told her they want to treat the injuries aggressively, “because she’s young and she’s fit, and they want to give her every opportunity to fight.”

Fentum said her daughter is a fighter. “Nobody in this hospital knows how tough she is. They don’t know what she can do.

“I’ve given myself a window in which I’m not allowed to fall apart until she wakes up,” she said. “Right now. I’m full on, type-A control junkie.”

The first small response took place Wednesday morning, when her daughter’s pupils reacted to light.

Fentum said she has been deluged by support from the horse-riding community across the continent.

“It’s incredible,” she said, after posting news of the accident on Facebook, prompting donations from as far away as Florida. “The reality is everyone who rides horses realizes we are one ride away from being in that bed instead of her.”

Fentum-Jones has worked in the horse business for the past three years at Assiniboia Downs in Winnipeg, Misty River Ranch near Île-des-Chênes, and K-5 Stables in Rosser.

“She told me she likes horses and animals better than people, which is kind of the way a lot of us are,” her mother said.

K-5 stable manager Stahl said doctors can’t determine the extent of the damage yet. “It’s going to be one of those wait-and-see outcomes,” said the president of the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, an umbrella organization for horse owners in Manitoba.

The fundraising webpage asks “all the horsemen and women around the country and world to help this young lady. Also the thoroughbred horse-racing community and all her friends, people she touched her life with.”

More than $6,300 of its $20,000 target had been raised as of Wednesday afternoon.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca