Rodeo Fall Survivor Called "Walking Miracle"

Farmington, NM, USA

20 year-old Blake Arp wasn't too concerned when he regained consciousness on the ground on July 26th, after being thrown off a bull in the National High School Finals Rodeo. The cowboy has built his life around the rodeo, and even plans to attend Clarendon College in Clarendon, Texas on a full rodeo scholarship. He's spent enough time in rodeos to know that sometimes, you get thrown. His biggest concern as he came to was over the state of his hat.

But Arp's C1 vertebra, known as the "atlast," had been fractured. If the C1 sounds familiar, you could be remembering actor Christopher Reeves, who broke his in 1995. But while Reeves was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his live, Blake Arp is making a recovery his doctors call miraculous.

As Arp lay on the ground after his fall, he realized that while he could move his legs, he wasn't able to get up. He was transported to the San Juan Regional Medical Center, where his doctors held few hopes for his recovery. According to Arp, “They didn’t know I could walk for a long time. One day, they started to move me from my bed and I saw that they were having trouble and I said ‘I can get up and lay down on the bed.’” He continues, “When I got up and stood up they were like, ‘You can’t walk yet.’ They thought it was a miracle that I was standing up walking.”

Apparently, they thought it was a miracle that he had even survived. Immediately following Blake's accident, “The doctor came in and told me that it was a miracle that I could even breathe,” Arp said. “They said that if I had moved my neck side to side when I was on the ground that it would have cut off my air supply and killed me.”

Instead, Blake will spend the next few months in the euphemistically named “halo” which keeps his head from moving side-to-side, and after that, a neck brace. His full recovering will take about a year. And then, he plans to get right back into the rodeo ring. “Being out a year is worth a lifetime,” Arp said. “I’d rather sacrifice one year than my whole rodeo career.” His scholarship at Clarendon will be waiting for him, when he's ready.

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