Courtney King-Dye
Story by Deborah Welky Photos by Susan J. Stickle
Accident Turns Olympic Rider Into A Helmet Safety Activist On March 3, 2010, 32-year-old dressage rider and instructor Courtney King-Dye was training a horse when it suddenly tripped over its own feet and stumbled to the ground. The 1,500-pound animal landed on top of her, fracturing her skull, and King-Dye went into a coma.
Courtney King Dye at a Paralympic event.
A month later, the former Olympian (Beijing, 2008) miraculously emerged, although all four lobes of her brain had been impacted — the frontal lobe (reasoning, motor skills, cognition), the parietal lobe (eye gaze, language), the occipital lobe (word, object and color recognition) and the temporal lobe (speech and memory). “I remember nothing from three days before the accident,” King-Dye said. “When I first came out of the coma, I couldn’t breathe on my own. Couldn’t make noise. Had a stomach tube.” So King-Dye went to work, applying the same perseverance that had taken her to the Beijing Olympics to the rehabilitation process. But it was slow going, and she was often frustrated. “When I became tube-free, I had no neck control,” recalled King-Dye, a part-time Wellington resident. “My head would loll to the side. I would drool. I had to relearn to eat.” But she was nothing if not determined. King-Dye signed on with the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey and got to work. The Kessler Institute, designated a model system by the National Institute of Disability Rehabilitation and Research, had the resources to address the entire range of physical and functional challenges facing King-Dye — everything from swallowing to vision problems, from |wellington |wellington the the magazine| magazine| March March 2013 2013
89 89