I had a horse fall with me on the landing step of a jump many years ago and flip me over her head. I kicked the ground hard and fractured my ankle and broke my fibula. I also found out I was a few days pregnant when it happened (though I didn’t have full confirmation of that until a couple of weeks later). So I was on a schedule to get back on a horse before I was too pregnant to ride, with a goal of getting to a show before I had to stop jumping.
They put me in my cast after surgery (to put in 4 screws and reattach ligaments), which was maybe a week post-break, and I went down to the barn a couple of days later to see if I could ride. The answer was a definite, “no!” The cast made my leg stick out from the saddle in way too of an awkward way. Also, they stopped the cast before/below the break in my fibula, so trying to ride made the broken bone click :dead:
I ended up back on a horse the day they cut my cast off. I’ve posted about it before, so you can probably search and find my to-the-day timeline of how mine went, but I can’t recall exactly offhand. I think that I had my cast on for maybe 3 or so weeks? They cut my cast off at that point and moved me to a walking boot. I would take the walking boot off to ride and just rode without a stirrup on that foot for the next couple of months.
I managed to get back into the show ring in the 1.30m jumpers for one horseshow at around the 12 week mark. I definitely wasn’t fully healed, and walking courses was difficult with the limp I had going. Also, landing from the jumps would occasionally hurt pretty darn bad. But we made it through the show and my ankle felt better at the end of the week than it had in the beginning. And then after that I had to start backing off of the jumping because of my ever expanding mid-section. But if I hadn’t been pregnant I would have considered myself pretty close to full function at that point. Took another 3-4 months before my ankle felt (relatively) pain free, though. And probably a full year before I had most of my ROM back. And then another year to when they pulled out two of the screws to stop having spasms of pain when I would crouch or squat down (e.g. putting on splint boots).
Now (8 years later) it feels the same as the other ankle and I haven’t had any major issues with it.