In the late afternoon of March 6, 2016, Tabitha Hale sat astride her horse at her mother’s home in Lula, Georgia, looking forward to a leisurely ride. Less than 30 minutes later, Tabitha was lying “face down in the gravel” with a fractured skull.
Tabitha recalled visiting her mother, Kim Smith, with her husband, Jacob, and their four boys, then aged between 2 and 14. Jacob set off home with the boys; Tabitha, a novice horse rider, stayed behind to go riding with her mom.
“She’s got the gift of not remembering,” Kim added. “But unfortunately, I remember.”
“When I came around the corner, she was lying face-down,” Kim recalled. “I jumped off my horse and ran up to her, and she was non-responsive. I just held her in my arms and called 911.”
Kim described realizing the horrific extent of her daughter’s head trauma. At one point, Tabitha “got up on all fours and looked at me,” Kim explained, “and I could tell something was wrong. She didn’t recognize me and just started flailing her arms, panicking like she was afraid.”
The paramedics arrived, and Tabitha was rushed to Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville. Kim called Jacob, who didn’t grasp the severity of his wife’s fall at first. “I just thought it was going to be a concussion or something, and she’d be fine,” Jacob said.
Kim recalled the doctors refusing to offer “false hope.” Kim and Jacob asked their family and friends to pray for a miracle.
“They didn’t know if she would come out of the surgery or not,” Kim explained. “I was told by a nurse if she did come out, she would probably not be walking or talking, but she could possibly learn to do all those things again.”
Tabitha’s doctors removed part of the right side of her skull before putting her on a ventilator in the ICU and placing her in an induced coma. The family’s worst fears were becoming a reality.
However, against the odds, Tabitha woke up on her own the very next day. She recognized her family; she could even wiggle her toes.
“At this point, doctors and nurses were already calling me a miracle,” Tabitha later wrote in her journal, “and word was spreading very fast about what happened to me through the hospital.”
Two days later, Tabitha was able to come off her ventilator. “By lunch that day, I was off the ventilator and didn’t just speak one word,” Tabitha regaled. “God let me say a complete sentence: ‘Do not ever let them do that to me again.’”
Tabitha was allowed home after just nine days in hospital. In June of 2016, just three months after her devastating accident, Tabitha returned to her job as an administrative secretary for the City of Oakwood with no restrictions.
The mom of four’s recovery was so swift that she had surgery to replace the missing skull fragment just six weeks after leaving the hospital. Doctors had initially estimated that Tabitha would need to wait six months before having the surgery.
Tabitha even decided to brave the saddle again; she returned to horse riding, an activity she loves.
