As it's been for 23 years running, Viola Ose, RN, spent the third week of July dressed in a Western blouse, bolo tie, boots and a cowboy hat, tending to professional cowboys at the "Daddy of 'em of All," the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo.

The rest of the year, Ose, 50, travels the Cheyenne, Wyo., area and northeastern Colorado to audit hospital bills for a California insurance company. She's also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and is scheduled to retire with the lifting of an order that prohibited medical personnel from leaving the military after Sept. 11. Ose serves at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, right in the back yard of the nation's largest outdoor rodeo and its medical provider.

Sitting beneath the grandstand within a few yards of the bull-riding chutes and with the public address announcements echoing in the background, Ose said on the Saturday before the finals that one cowboy had been treated for a broken jaw. "But most of what we see are strains and sprains, where they've gotten their legs twisted in the wrong direction," she said.

For such injuries, Ose and her Air Force nursing partners offer the cowboys elastic bandages, ice and advice: "Go in for X-rays." But few do.

It's not that they don't have insurance. Contestants typically are covered by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

"Most cowboys are just extremely tough," Ose said. "They get injured pretty regularly. They won't even let you look at them unless they've seriously had the wind blown out of them or some kind of broken bone. They're really a tough breed."

It's an image that wranglers cultivate, perhaps to their own detriment.

Ose said the medical staff recommended that one cowboy who had been knocked unconscious go in for a CT scan, but after he collected his thoughts, "He said, 'Oh, no. I've been knocked unconscious at least 12 or 13 times.' "

She wondered aloud, "How many times can you be knocked silly before it has some kind of effect?"

Ose said the bull riders and bronc busters take hard falls, but are good about warming up and stretching their muscles. "The one thing they're not very good about, and it's because they're so macho, is that very few of them will wear a helmet. If I could get them to do one thing differently, that would be to wear a helmet. That could save some head injuries," she said.

But professional cowboys are as protective of their Wild West image as they are of their herds. They're worse than motorcyclists, Ose said. "And how long have we been trying to get people to ride motorcycles with a helmet? "

Whenever cowboys ride and people come to watch, nurses are standing by.

Across the arena, an American Red Cross team takes care of visitor injuries and illnesses. Most of those are self-inflicted, the result of drunkenness, carnival rides or people who are unprepared for the July heat that easily brushes 100 degrees and the altitude of the high plains.

Fewer serious injuries result from calf roping and steer wrestling, Ose said, but the practical and lifelong skill of dismounting a moving horse still involves some risk.

"They've even got seniors who do some of these roping-type things," Ose said. "We're talking 75-year-old men out there on a horse doing rodeo. I guess they just grow up tough. It's a way of life."

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.