Ashley McBryde is sharing details of her horse accident in September, which resulted in canceling a few of her shows. The future Grand Ole Opry member is now revealing more details about the incident, and how severely she was injured.
It was McBryde’s assistant, Dayna Slaughenhoupt, who arranged for McBryde to go horseback riding at Bart and Wendy Morris’ ranch, since her roommate was from Missoula, Montana, where McBryde was slated to play that night.
“I really wasn’t nervous,” McBryde recalls in an episode of her Made For This YouTube series, even though their horseback rides took them through the water. “These horses work together all the time, and they work with these humans all the time. So it’s kind of a situation where you could put a toddler on the horse, and it sitll could have ridden across this river, no problem.”
McBryde had switched from a horse named Blue to one named Jenny, and in the process, the stirrups weren’t shortened for the new horse, which proved to be a near-fatal error.
“It seems like that’s not a big deal,” McBryde acknowledges. “It’s a huge deal.”
When McBryde’s horse started to go fast, she did everything she knew to do to slow the horse down. Unfortunately, those actions also resulted in her fall off of Jenny.
“I leaned a little too far,” McBrdye shares. “Bart said from his point of view, I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything to make it worse. But the fact remains that, according to physics, if you’re going that fast, standing on one leg and leaning in that direction, you fall.”
It was Wendy who first realized the gravity of McBryde’s injuries, and began doing life-saving measures on the singer.
“When I got there, Ashley was unconscious, and there was blood behind her head, and she was not breathing effectively,” Wendy remembers. “So I immediately assisted her breathing and gave her mouth to mouth, and did that for a couple of minutes, until she started breathing on her own, and I was assisting her, holding her airways so that she was ventilating. A little while after that, Ashley opened her eyes. And that was a huge sigh of relief. Huge relief for all of us there.”
The details of the event are unclear in McBryde’s mind. But she does recall how she felt when she was back in her bus after she was discharged from the hospital.
“I remember the hospital, a little bit,” McBryde recounts. “I remember waking up in the bus that night. I think it was that night. It was very dark in my room. I went to stand up, and of course I was really woozy, and I was a little confused. And I remember thinking, ‘Crap. I don’t think I made it.'”
McBryde was told to rest for a minimum of 14 days, but she was too eager to return to performing to fully adhere to those guidelines. Still, McBryde learned a lot of lessons through the harrowing experience, lessons she now freely shares with others.
“It’s okay to let someone see you hurt,” says the singer. “It’s okay to bet on yourself when you’re not at 100 percent. Surround yourself with people that won’t allow you to walk up an incline or up a flight of stairs without assistance. Give yourself friends and a support system that will feed you, that will help you do everything you can to the best of your ability when you’re really in a really sh—y, vulnerable spot. Always shorten your stirrups.”
McBryde just earned a CMA Award, for Musical Event of the Year, for her “Never Wanted To Be That Girl” collaboration with Carly Pearce. She will officially be inducted into the Grand Ole Opry on December 10.
Tickets for McBryde’s induction into the Grand Ole Opry can be found here. Find music and tour dates at AshleyMcBryde.com.
Photo Credit: Katie Kauss
