Paralyzed Horse-Lover Overrides Barriers to Love, Career

Here was the scene that had the guests wiping away tears: Jennifer Price, white wedding dress flowing, riding side-saddle atop her beloved horse Royal Hassan as her father walked her down the aisle on the lawn outside an Irvine church.

But I’m already getting ahead of my story. Let me back up a few years.

As a young girl, Jennifer Price fell in love with animals. Her family lived in Santa Ana but most weekends or holidays would find Jennifer at a stable in Fountain Valley, where the owner would let her and friends pay off riding lessons by doing odd jobs.

On one visit, when Jennifer was 12, a filly with a throat infection demanded immediate attention. Pressed into emergency duty, Jennifer helped hold the thrashing horse as a vet performed a tracheotomy and, to her wonderment, the filly that she thought might die was soon up and running around the stables.

That was the day Jennifer decided she would be a horse veterinarian.

Just weeks before the end of her freshman year in high school, Jennifer, then 14, was at the barn, swinging as she had hundreds of times from a rope hung from the rafters. A metal trash can lid served as the seat, and Jennifer and others swung among the hay bales, from one side of the barn to the other.

On the fateful day--May 10, 1986--the rope broke from the rafters and Jennifer fell about 10 or 15 feet to the stable floor, landing in the seated position. The impact compressed her spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.

From the start, she refused to abandon her dream of being a vet. Given one of her first chances for an outing from the hospital, she was asked if she wanted to go home or to the movies or wherever. She chose the stables.

“The accident wasn’t going to change my plans,” she said. “I figured I was going to have to be flexible and if I met an obstacle, I would deal with it then. I wasn’t going to invent them in my head.”

The stable manager gave her Royal Hassan as a get-well present. “My horse never flinched around me,” Jennifer said. “He couldn’t care less about the chair, and that helped a lot. If he felt like everything was normal, (I thought) maybe it was more normal than it seemed.”

Her sophomore year at Saddleback High School consisted of a reduced four-subject schedule, so she could fit in the six to eight hours of daily physical therapy. She did homework in the car on the way to and from rehab. Some days, she said, she didn’t get home until 10 p.m.

In her junior year, the rehab dropped to about four hours daily, and she did the therapy on home equipment her father built.

Jennifer graduated seventh out of 525 students. That summer, she got a job at a small-animal hospital, having realized that sitting in a wheelchair would make working with horses too problematic.

She enrolled at UC Irvine, majoring in biology, still with an eye to veterinary medicine. The normal procedure is to apply to vet school during your senior year of undergrad school. But before doing that, Jennifer made the trip to UC Davis, her choice for veterinarian school, to see if her physical situation would make a difference. School officials told her it wouldn’t.

In October, she applied for admission. In March, the letter arrived, telling her she had been accepted for the fall semester. If she’d been turned down, she said, she would have applied elsewhere next year and the year after that, until someone took her.

These, then, are busy days for Jennifer. She graduated from UCI with a 3.5 grade point average. She’s working as a receptionist for a property management firm but is leaving soon for Davis, with new husband Greg Pursley.

Oh, right. The wedding.

“I had been riding since the sixth grade,” she said. “Little girls are in love with their horses and, growing up, our whole gang said we were going to be married on horseback. We thought it would be the most romantic thing in the whole world.”

So it was that on July 10 Jennifer’s father, out behind the church, helped his daughter and her 20 pounds of wedding dress up onto Royal Hassan. He held the horse’s reins and led him from around the corner of the church to the waiting guests to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride.” At the makeshift altar, Jennifer’s father handed the reins to Greg.

The whole thing was a blur, Jennifer said. “I was so afraid of falling off or the horse eating someone’s corsage.”

Instead, Royal Hassan handled the ceremony with relative aplomb, even remaining perfectly still as Jennifer drank from the Communion cup.

Now, it’s off to veterinary school and wondering how they will pay for four years of schooling. Jennifer has no scholarship money and Greg doesn’t have a job lined up. First-year expenses are expected to be about $13,000, Jennifer said. “We’re just jumping off a cliff and hoping we get caught.”

Do you think for one minute that’s going to get her down?

I asked her about the accident and its impact on her life.

“I think I was put in a wheelchair for a specific reason. This is where God wants me. If he wanted me to walk, I would be healed. It’s not a big thing for me. I’ve seen good come from it. I think it’s built a lot of character, given me a lot of strength I wouldn’t have developed otherwise.

“It’s definitely part of my history, but it’s not really in the forefront of my mind, especially now with so many exciting things going on with my life. It’s just kind of second nature. People don’t think before they put on their jeans to go out. I don’t think before I get in my wheelchair to go out.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.