One Wednesday night, though, Anndrea, who lives in Benton, sat at her home church, Dunn Missionary Baptist Church in Dawson Springs, when she felt a calling to move her legs. “I’ve always had a little bit of tingling,” Anndrea says. “I was in church and something told me to lift my feet up. Tey came about as high as my knees. Te muscle spasms had caused her legs to kick up now and then. Tis wasn’t the same though. She moved her legs, and believes it was divine intervention. “I have always said that if God wanted me to walk again, I would,” she said. Fall of 2000 had already put a chill in the Draffenville air. Anndrea and her sister, Larra, planned to take their horses out for a ride. Anndrea mounted her brother’s horse, “Redman,” that day, Oct. 28, for a ride because her horse, Ahab, was a bit too spirited around the other horses, causing Anndrea to fall off a few times. Tis day Redman would do the same but with a costly result for Anndrea. “I remember, even to this day, everything I did that day except falling off the horse, Anndrea says. “Te last thing I remember was my pony tail had shook loose so I was just going to trot for a few steps and wrap the holder back in it. “Te next thing I know I am on the ground with my sister laughing and telling me to get up. When I started to get up, I flopped back down. She got down off her horse to check on me. I told her to straighten my legs because they felt bent, and she said they were straight. Tat is the instant I knew I was paralyzed.” From Larra’s perspective, things happened as Anndrea remembers. It appeared that Redman stumbled while Anndrea was playing with her hair and really had no way to keep herself from being thrown over the horses head and onto the ground. Anndrea was on her stomach, and when she raised herself up with her arms, she giggled and dropped back down, Larra says. “I rolled her over to make sure she was OK. She was raised up on her rolled to make sure she was OK, to make sure she was still breathing. She kept telling me, right away, that she was paralyzed,” Larra says. Larra ran to the house to get her mother and call for help. Anndrea was taken to Lourdes, where she waited two weeks for surgery. Te surgeon postponed Anndrea’s date with the operating room because INTHEVUE.COM Anndrea works closely with kids at Children’s Church each Sunday at her home church, Dunn Baptist Church in Dawson Springs, about 65 miles from her home in Benton. he believed someone else was working on her back. Larra recalls, “Te signals were getting stronger in her back, the doctor said, and as he put it ‘I didn’t like anyone going in and messing with my work and I’m not going to mess with anyone else’s.’” Tat someone else was God, the doctor told Larra. When it came time for the surgery, Anndrea had three vertebrae fused with cadaver bones because the vertebrae between the two was crushed. “Originally the doctors said she wouldn’t get any feeling back,” Larra said, believing Anndrea would never walk again. After therapy, Anndrea was classified as “incomplete” – meaning she had a chance to walk again – so the therapists got her up on the braces; the same braces the muscle spasms would keep her from using. Anndrea says she rode a horse just one more time, on the second anniversary of the accident, even though the family kept horses right up to a few years ago. As a side note, Anndrea says, “Te day I had my accident we had to take the horses and get their shots and tests done. Te vet we used that day is in a wheelchair and he fascinated me. We had used him before, and he never really phased me much. But that day I could not get enough of how he interacted with the horses from his chair. I remember looking at how he had his truck fixed up, and I remember looking back at how the ramps were attached to his house on our way out of the driveway. Tree hours later I was in the same shape. I think that was God’s way of preparing me. PROMOTING EVENTS THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE JANUARY 2015
