Tragic riding accident leaves UM nurse paralyzed from the neck down

The community is supporting a Grass Lake woman whose life has been turned upside down, and now she’s trying to figure out why something she’s loved her entire life is the cause of her greatest pain.

Dawn Rammage and Brianna Engel met while working as nurses at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. They hit it off, dated, got engaged and then married in 2019.

It’s been great, especially for Dawn, who loves Bri, enjoys being a nurse and loves horses. She started riding at 16 and is a farrier, someone who works on horses’ hooves.

Life was going according to plan until a perfect Saturday outing for couples turned into a disaster a few weeks ago.

“I was about 10 steps away from getting off and being done. And for some reason the horse bucked pretty hard twice and sent me into a spiral,” Dawn said.

She hit the ground head first. She didn’t lose consciousness as she spun through the air. That’s when she began to fear the worst.

“I feel like in nursing you know too much. So my arms flew back into a certain position. I knew it. I was paralyzed,” she said.

“For me, it was just emergency nurse mode. Within 20 minutes, the ambulance was there. I coordinated the people. The ambulance came to the back of the yard. We took a little walk. I coordinated the fire department,” Bri said.

Dawn had suffered a broken spine and was paralyzed from the neck down, except for a tiny spot on her right thumb where she still had feeling.

In addition, doctors told her that she had little chance of ever being able to walk again.

Dr. Gianna Rodriguez is the director of the Michigan Medical Spinal Cord Injury Program. She said every single spinal cord injury case is different.

“Most motor and sensory functions return within the first three months. The nervous system continues to recover gradually. This happens at six and 12 months. But it slows down a little. And after about a year, they say, a kind of plateau is reached,” Rodriguez said.

Despite Dawn’s circumstances, she has a positive attitude towards life and calls this a new adventure.

“Life keeps throwing new obstacles at me. Always. But you just have to keep going in that direction and say, ‘Okay, you got me there. But now I’m going in this direction,'” she said.

Dawn’s biggest goal is to be able to walk again.

If you would like to help Dawn, click here.