Emily Pomfrett makes inspiring recovery from serious brain injury after terrifying incident

The racing community feared the worst when apprentice jockey Emily Pomfrett was speared off a horse and headfirst into the ground but she is back riding after going to hell and back.

Speared headfirst into the ground when a horse flipped in a shocking incident in January, Queensland apprentice jockey Emily Pomfrett says the scariest thing was not the brain injury she suffered.

It was what doctors said to her after she took seven hours to finally wake from an induced coma.

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“The last thing I remember was being on the back of a horse and then I woke up in hospital,” Pomfrett told Racenet.

“The worst moment was the doctors walking in with a stretchy bandage thing and they said ‘we are going to try to get you up and see if you can walk’.

“I thought for them to say that, ‘to see if I could walk’, I thought ‘this is not good’.

“I was like, where’s my little boy (Pomfrett’s seven-year-old son Laker).

“I have no recollection of most of what happened.

“From what I got told, the horse went completely over and speared me into the ground.

“I got smashed into the ground and my head hit the ground really hard.

“I got airlifted to hospital and, from what I understand of my injury, it was a bad bleed on the brain.

“Apart from the brain injury, it turned out that I had two broken bones in my leg that they missed and I walked around for days with them broken.

“They thought I was wobbly and unsteady because of the brain injury.

“It wasn’t until I had a little stumble in the hospital that they looked into it further.

“My partner Luke pleaded with them to at least X-ray my leg – jockeys are pretty tough, he was telling them that if I was saying something was broken, then it would be.

“They found one break and then a week later when I had an MRI, they found the other one.”

Queensland apprentice jockey Emily Pomfrett at Mike Crooks’ training property this week as she continues her recovery from a brain injury sustained in a horror incident earlier this year. Picture: Ben Dorries

Pomfrett has been to hell and back in the last 11 months, but the uplifting news is that she is back doing what she loves and riding horses.

The 35-year-old is riding trackwork for Mishani owner Mike Crooks and trainer Donna Stanbridge at the private training property at Gleneagle, near Beaudesert.

Pomfrett has already attained her license to ride in trials and is hoping to get her race riding license back in the not too distant future.

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She freely admits she still struggles with symptoms of her brain injury – but she has come a long way since the tight-knit racing community held its breath when she plunged off a horse at Gatton on January 4.

“Because I am so arrogant, I just push through and so people just assume I am OK but I do still struggle a lot day to day,” Pomfrett said.

“They told me I could have some memory loss and I do, maybe not with everything, but with certain things.

“I got in the car the other day and I couldn’t find my wallet and I had no recollection of what I’d done with it.

“I have my first appointment with a neurologist soon and I have waited months and months for that and it has been a really hard process.

“I’ve really had to push to get therapy as I didn’t really have any rehab for months and months after the injury.”

Jockey Emily Pomfrett with her son, Laker.

Throughout the harrowing ordeal, Pomfrett has always been focused on one day returning to race riding.

A mature-age apprentice jockey who had previously worked in delivering acupuncture to horses as well as working away from racing, Pomfrett had only been race riding for six months before that awful day at Gatton.

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“It has always been 100 per cent that I want to get back to race riding,” Pomfrett said.

“It was literally a year ago that I won my last race at Warwick – it was my first win at a TAB meeting.

“I understand that riding horses is a dangerous job and injuries come with the territory.

“But, despite what has happened, I am in no way scared of riding.

“I actually feel better on a horse because when I’m leading them and they bump me, that’s when I lose my balance a bit.

“It’s a massive door opener for me riding at the Mishani business, as I’ve come from a very small stable and nobody really knew who I was.

“Now I feel that with a little bit more backing and support, I might actually get noticed a bit more.

“I have always been a natural lightweight, I was walking around at 50kg before the accident and I got up to 57kg while I was off and that's the heaviest I've been in my life.”

Emily Pomfrett and her partner, fellow jockey Luke Miller. Picture: Ben Dorries

As Pomfrett lay prone in hospital for several weeks and then faced a painstaking recovery process, her partner and fellow jockey Luke Miller has been a constant by her side.

Miller has nothing but admiration for Pomfrett’s resilience – considering what could have been.

“She was in an induced coma and the waking up process was the scariest bit, not knowing what was going to be wrong,” Miller said.

“The process to wake her up took about seven hours.

“When she woke up, she could talk and remember who I was which was brilliant, but then the process after that trying to find rehab was a long one.

“Every day I was on the phone to doctors trying to organise appointments, because Emily just wanted help.

“She has had dizziness and fatigue along the way and that has an emotional side to it.

“It takes its toll, but she has come a very long way in a relatively short period of time.”

In her short riding career, Pomfrett has ridden 13 winners from 106 starts but is hoping there are many more winners to come when she receives a clearance to resume race riding.

Originally published as Emily Pomfrett makes inspiring recovery from serious brain injury after terrifying incident