SAN ANTONIO – If you’ve been missing Ursula Pari on the noon and 5 o'clock news, you haven’t been alone. She’s been on quite a journey off-camera, but she will return to TVs all over San Antonio on Thursday.
"Many thanks for all the flowers, gifts, amazing notes and messages of encouragement, emails, and calls to check up on me," Pari said.
Pari, as some of you may know, has been enamored with everything equine since she was a child. She also has a passion for polo, one of the world's oldest-known team sports that involves riding horseback.
She was participating in one of those games with her horse Nugget on June 2 when she took a life-changing fall.
As Nugget was running on the way to goal, Pari reached too far for a ball and lost her grip on the saddle.
“I knew there was no getting back in place and was sideways on the horse, so I kicked my feet out of the stirrups and bailed off,” Pari said.
But Pari was going so fast and bailed out so hard that she crushed her ribcage, punctured her right lung, broke her collarbone and thumb.
She was taken in an ambulance to the BAMC Trauma Unit, where she quickly had a chest tube inserted. The chest tube was necessary to keep her breathing in the intensive care unit.
A day later, surgeons opened up her chest and set an entire row of ribs that had compound fractures and added metal plates to help them mend.
Pari was in the hospital for 10 days and was then sent home to recover. She's been doing so for more than two months.
Having said that, Pari is returning to deliver news to you on Thursday.
“I’ll return to KSAT with a new appreciation for health, oxygen and fitness,” she said.