Third Trip to Emergency Room

Yesterday's riding lesson started out well but ended painfully.

I was excited because recently I've felt really comfortable riding and jumping. This is an activity I'd done a lot in the past but had left behind after college. Lately, my horse and I were like one going around the ring and gliding over the fences. I think I was happiest about the fact that I had no fear, that the whole exercise was a challenge I could meet.

But yesterday morning, about four paces after I cleared a fence, I lost my right stirrup. I couldn't slow my horse because I'd given her too much rein. I tried to hang on but I couldn't. Down I went into soft sand. I felt hurt but I tried to get up and crawl away from my horse in case she might step on me. Then I saw she was standing still, about two feet away. (Oh how I love that horse!)

"Frances, are you okay?" my teacher asked.

"I don't know," I said, feeling I shouldn't make too big a deal out of it.

He helped me stand up and brush off the sand I was covered in from head to toe.

"I think you're okay. Get back on and we go again," he said.


My teacher is a very nice man and an excellent instructor. He is from Morocco and speaks Arabic, French, and English - sometimes all three in a group lesson. I knew he wanted me to put the fall behind me by having a good finish to the class. But my right arm was killing me.

I drove myself to an emergency room and waited in the females' waiting room with about 12 local ladies covered in black. I closed my eyes and tried to keep my tears from spilling down my dusty face. Once again I found the emergency-room care to be excellent, though everything did take a long time. After two rounds of x-rays it was determined that I broke my arm, about two inches above the wrist, in three pieces.

About seven hours later I was ready to go home, my arm in a cast from the middle of my upper arm to the ends of the knuckles on my fingers. M drove me home and has been an angel ever since.


I can't ride or run or write long-hand, or do pretty much anything, for eight weeks.


But as usual, there's a silver lining to my incapacitation.


"I wish I could make you feel better, but I honestly don't know how to comfort the comforter," my 17-year-old said last night.


Everyone has been icredibly kind. My dear neighbors brought me chocolates and offered rides for our kids. My ten-year-old says he'll lead the kitchen clean-up for the next week. My 13-year-old daughter helps me dress and will wash my hair. My rambunctious eight-year-old says he will follow me from room to room, seeing what I need. What more could I ask for?

Abu Dhabi Days Are Passing

This picture - of a setting sun near my home in Abu Dhabi - seems to capture my mood of late.

Perhaps it's the shortened days as we approach the winter equinox. Maybe it's that Christmas is two weeks away, and soon it will be the end of another year.

It could also be due to a discussion about family life I enjoyed yesterday in my home, an experience I know I cannot duplicate in the U.S. It was during my book club. I was one of two Americans in a group of nine women.

"We are both from Africa," my friend from Sudan said to my friend from South Africa when they were introduced. There was also a friend from Switzerland, one from England, two friends from Wales and one from Jordan. It was terrific.

Whatever the reason, I'm increasingly aware that our time in Abu Dhabi is going fast. Before I know it, next summer will be here. I'll be standing in a room full of brown boxes, sighing as I think how bare the walls are without our prints hanging. We'll be moving home. This is something I long for and dread at the same time.

Last weekend my eight-year-old was accidentally hit in the head with a hockey stick. When I first saw his handsome blond face, his nose and mouth bloody, my heart did a leap. I thought the skin under his nose was cut straight through to his mouth.

I get strangely calm when my children are hurt, but as I wiped his cuts and discovered they were not serious, alarms still rang in my head. I wished we were home. I've made two visits to emergency rooms with my children thus far in Abu Dhabi, and the care was excellent both times. But I still wished I were in my own country.

Of course the main pull towards home is missing friends and family. Recently, too, one of my best friends back home experienced a tremendous loss. The distance between Abu Dhabi and New Hampshire was heart-wrenching. These are the times I long to blink my eyes and open them to see pine trees and snow.

Most days, though, I like Abu Dhabi so much I know it will break my heart to leave. When my ten-year-old tells me about the nice boy from Yemen he's made friends with, or my 16-year-old arrives home, as he did yesterday, energized by a school competition in Cairo, I think I could stay forever.