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by Clare La Plante
As Nancy Keeney Smith can tell you, life can change in a split second.
On November 18, 1986, a typically cool and sunny
late-autumn day in Gainesville, Florida, Smith, then
29, was riding her bike to work. Life was good—Smith was
recently married, and had a job she liked as a
disk jockey at a local radio station.
Without warning, a school bus driving on the shared road
made an illegal turn into the bike lane, knocking Smith
over, and dragged her some 60 feet down the paved road.
The bus demolished her bike, and the friction from the
road tore the skin from her left leg in a severe case of
burn-like “road rash.”
 With her husband of one-and-a-half years by her side,
Smith spent the next six weeks in the burn unit
of Shands Hospital at the University of Florida where
she began the first of more than 30 surgeries, mostly
skin grafts. She also underwent physical therapy and
debridement—an immensely painful procedure
where the non-living skin is surgically and chemically
removed so that the skin underneath might have a chance
to live.
Once home, Smith’s life returned to quasi-normal—she was
able to stop the narcotic pain medication,
she finished the physical therapy for range of motion,
and she returned to work, although this time in
marketing, which was less stressful than disk jockeying.
Normalcy returned with a vengeance with the birth of her
children—a
son in 1990 and a daughter in 1992. However, by this
time, the grafted skin on her left leg had caused
chronic lymphedema—swelling from
accumulated lymphatic fluid. The doctors’ only
recommendation was bulky compression garments and
several hours of bed rest a day, a tall order for a
working mother of two young children.
In
frustration, Smith turned to a friend, a personal
trainer who was also a student at the Florida School of
Massage, for exercise suggestions. The friend, who had
just taken a class in sports flushing (a drainage
technique), had a better idea. She asked Smith if she
would be a case study for her.
Smith hesitated at first. “With traumatic scarring,
you’re very conscious of anyone outside your personal
sphere seeing your injury,” says Smith. With doctors
offering no other feasible alternative, she gave it a
try.
After 20 minutes of massage, “the edema was flushed out
for 24 hours and the color changed from red-purple to
almost natural skin tone, a tone that I hadn’t seen in
years,” Smith says. She’s had no surgery since, and was
able to stop her daily dose of 2500 mg of ibuprofen.
“What If ?”
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American Massage Therapy Association®
