JULIE TEW
A tumour on her spinal cord changed this eventer’s life forever. She tells Julie Harding about nerve damage, battling depression and being told she’d never walk, let alone ride, again
JULIE TEW IS CRYING. Two narrow parallel streams course down her tanned cheeks. Sitting cross-legged on a worktop in the kitchen area of her tack room, she grabs a tea towel and pats her face dry. Temporarily. Still they f low. These aren’t the kind of tears shed by a (briefly) desolate Andy Murray on losing Wimbledon in 2012. Those were quickly dried and replaced 12 months later by beaming smiles. The event rider’s tears symbolise two decades of unseen and largely unknown (beyond her immediate family) pain, darkness, depression, anger, insecurity, frustration and disappointment — but, on the flip side, euphoria. Her completion of Burghley’s cross-country course in September after so much hurt felt like winning Wimbledon — or maybe better? “I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. I had just proved to myself that I was as good as I had been before,” she says in between the tears. Before the discovery, in 2000, of a small tumour on her spinal cord, Julie was a normal, active, fearless, ambitious teenager with an abnormal talent in the saddle. The 21-year-old had already amassed a collection of silverware from successes at pony and young rider level eventing and dreams of future Olympic outings looked likely to be fulfilled. The growth, the size of a 50p piece, first gave notice of its presence at the Young Rider Final trial at Hartpury in 1995. “We had to stay overnight to trot up the horses for the selectors in the morning. That morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t move. I had horrendous pins and needles down my left leg into my foot,” Julie recalls. “They told me I had to see the doctors. The day afterwards, I was fine. “A year later it happened again. It lasted a couple of hours; awful sciatic pain all down my left leg. Over time it started to get more frequent and I’d end up in bed for weeks at a time. But I had no pain when I was riding.” GPs and surgeons felt they were searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. They could see nothing. Even an MRI scan highlighted only an “insignificant cyst”. But Ian Sabin, motorbike fan, fellow adrenaline junkie and consultant neurosurgeon at The Wellington Hospital in London, dug deeper and found the cyst to be a benign tumour. That was the good news. The bad was that its surgical removal could cause paralysis. “When Ian told me, it went in one ear and out the other. I ignored the fact that I could end up in a wheelchair. It was February and I told him the eventing season season started in March. He said, ‘you’re not competing’. But I’d just bought a horse from Australia; I refused the operation and told him to put me on medication so that I could compete. “I started taking four gabapentin a day, but it makes you sleepy, so my way of solving that was to take two at night. I also took tramadol, which gave me spots on my knees, but I didn’t care as long as I could ride. I told Ian I would come back in October. He agreed only on the condition that I had regular scans and if the tumour grew I’d have to have the operation immediately. It was sheer luck that it didn’t.”
Laughter. A 44-year-old Julie can see the folly in her 26-year-old self. Back in hospital, the tumour was finally removed, along with three vertebrae. The procedure was deemed a success. Julie would be home in 10 days. But then she tried to get out of bed. Standing was as impossible as flying to the moon with a rocket belt. The surgeon was shocked at the severity of the nerve damage. “Another doctor said I would never sit on a horse again,” says Julie. “They hoped to get me walking with a stick at best. I didn’t hear them. I turned to Mum and said, ‘I will walk and I will ride’. “The doctors thought I was crazy, but I did agree to stay in hospital and then do six months of rehab. I got around in a
“When it came to my first trip home, we lied about having wheelchair access in our historic cottage that had steps everywhere”
wheelchair and found myself being taught basic skills like how to make a cup of tea. I remember saying to them, ‘why are you doing this’? I won’t need it.”
The medical profession had rarely encountered a Julie Tew; someone with a barely imaginable drive to see between a horse’s ears from the elevated position of its back. “I pushed myself every day. I started to get more mobile. Mum was incredible. I started walking with her holding on to me. When it came to my first trip home, we lied about having wheelchair access in our historic cottage that had steps everywhere. “Somehow I managed. On the first day I was lifted on to a really quiet horse and led around the arena. I was terrified as I couldn’t feel my feet and I couldn’t balance, but it was the best thing that could have happened. I felt liberated. I’d been told I wasn’t ever going on a horse again and here I was on one, five weeks after the operation. “Back in hospital, I told the nurses and they said, ‘good on you. We get people in here who want to give up’. They found the fact that I pushed myself exhilarating. I made them teach me to walk in heels — I was going to a party — and I walked out of there six weeks to the day after my operation.” Life returned to normal; days filled with hacking, schooling and competing horses. Except normal it wasn’t. Painful, exhausting and miserable were more like it. The grey Sir Roselier (‘Lumpy’), now 26 and happily munching hay in the loosebox next to the tack room, helped Julie to make the transition from terra firma to flying huge, solid fences. “I felt really safe on him and knew he would look after me. I did have a run of good results with my horses, but they could have been better. I rode at four-star level and was longlisted for the Olympics [in 2008 on Look Out], but for me it wasn’t good enough.” The tears flow again. “I was never the same on a horse and I became angry. I was tricky. It was anger at the realisation that I would never be the same again. I took it out on family and friends in an unhealthy way.”
Ableak gloom of depression reached a climax three years ago. “I had a breakdown at Burgham Horse Trials. By this time I had slowly started to open up about how hard things were. I contemplated giving up quite a few times. If it wasn’t for Claire [Mealing, her head girl] and mum and dad [Vicky and Brian Tew], who never pressured me, I don’t know what I would have done.” Rob Bor, a psychologist (see panel, far right), worked to diminish the darkness. “Mentally I felt in a better place — like someone had flicked a switch. I finally accepted who and what I was. It had taken a long time, but I no longer worried what other people were thinking. The fact that I’ve got to this point is massive. “The depression hasn’t happened for 18 months, although I’ve had low periods.” The years, though, are marching and the tough toil that goes on backstage wreaks havoc on a fragile constitution. “I don’t think I’m physically and mentally strong enough to fight this any more. I want more from life.” But for Julie’s new-found fans, who rooted for her in September when she came clean to the nation via the BBC, sharing the secrets of the health battle that few friends even knew of, fear not. She hopes to be at Badminton next May. Julie and her bay gelding Simply Sox are now the Bob Champion and Aldaniti of the eventing world — and people want more. Against the odds stories really don’t come better than this one — an equine returnee from injury (Sox also has chronic arthritis in both back fetlocks) and a seriously physically compromised rider.
So what, after a wait of a quarter of a century, got Julie (almost) through the toughest horse trials in the world? “I was in this amazing place, feeling good mentally and physically and Sox felt incredible. That gave me a huge amount of confidence. I couldn’t sleep the night before the cross-country. I felt alive. “But I was insanely nervous on Saturday morning. I jumped a few practice fences, but my legs were frozen. I was terrified, thinking ‘what am I doing?’ Then Sox missed at a roll top and clambered all over it. I got a grip of myself and my nerves went.” In a stupendous round — and bearing in mind that no one has ever completed Burghley before with 90% nerve damaged legs — they cleared all 30 fences. “Over the last three, I was really weak. If Sox had tripped, I would have fallen off.” The Tew family was engulfed by tears. So was Julie’s team. So was the horse world. People Julie had never met were affected. “I’ve been so moved by the messages people sent me.” But Julie and Sox were no shows at Sunday morning’s vet inspection. “Sox had a haematoma on his back leg and I wondered if he’d hit the rolltop in the warm-up. It wasn’t remotely possible to present him at the trot up, so I withdrew him that night. I couldn’t face any questions, so I loaded him up and we went home. A week later he was sound as a pound.” Looking forwards, when retirement can no longer be postponed, Julie Tew may breed horses, help to run the family farm — the Tews own 300 acres of Gloucestershire farmland — and watch other people go eventing, maybe on a horse she part owns. “Whatever happens, I’ll always look back on that day at Burghley. It will see me through.”