BY TONYA RATLIFF-GARRISON, FIELD EDITOR
About 10 days before the 2007 AQHYA World Championship Show, McKensey Coit was in excruciating pain.
“I was hurting really bad, and I finally went to the emergency room,” the 18-year-old recalled. “They ran a bunch of tests on me and they were like, ‘Whoa!’ That’s when they rushed me in for surgery.”
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| Despite gallbladder surgery a week before, McKensey Coit made it back to the team penning finals. She and her team placed seventh. |
McKensey’s gallbladder needed to be immediately removed. On July 27, she went under the knife.
“I was very angry, because I was riding like three horses a night getting ready for Youth World, and I ended up being in the hospital for over a week,” she said.
But she was still determined to make it to Fort Worth, Texas.
“My doctor was kind of concerned that I wanted to do that but he knew there was really no stopping me,” she said. “I’ve been coming here since I was 7, and I was determined to get here.”
While McKensey was in the hospital, her sister, Megan, rode McKensey’s horses to keep them ready for the show.
“And she had two horses of her own to ride,” McKensey said. “She was really great to do that.”
McKensey was back riding her own horses August 1 and left for Ford Youth World on August 3. She was riding in her first prelims August 4.
“I showed three horses: one in cutting, two in penning and two in sorting,” she said. “I was pretty sore when I finished.”
McKensey couldn’t take any of her pain pills the days she rode.
“So I had to bear it, and the pain could get really bad,” she said. “I put on a belly wrap, and it helped a lot but it still hurt.”
McKensey tried not to let the pain affect her or let other people know she was hurting, but when she was performing, she would anticipate the pain and would become nervous before her rides.
“I was tense, especially in the cutting, because when we would stop hard, I would feel like I wanted to get off the cow real quick and I had a hot quit in the preliminaries,” she said.
But McKensey rode through the pain.
“I had to, especially in the team penning and ranch sorting,” she said. “I couldn’t let my teammates down. I had six people depending on me.”
She didn’t make it to the finals in ranch sorting or cutting, but she did come back on one of her horses in team penning August 6. She and her team came in seventh.
“Our time was too high in the preliminaries for us to win but I’m happy that we were in the top 10,” she said.
McKensey headed back home to Arapaho, Oklahoma, on August 7, but there will still be no time for rest and recuperation.
“I have to work ,and then I have to get ready to move to Gainesville (Texas), where I’ll be starting college at North Central Texas in two weeks,” she said. “But I have one more year to show at Youth World. I hope nothing will go wrong next year.”
