massage therapy journal

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“What If ?”

Over the next few years, she continued receiving massage. On September 11, 2001, when the planes hit the Twin Towers, she had an epiphany. “I realized how quickly your life can change, especially with [my accident].  I needed to do something more valuable in my life. Exactly a year later I started massage school.”

She graduated from the Florida School of Massage in 2003, with a vague notion of helping other survivors. A year-and-a-half post-graduation, while working part-time at the school as she built her practice, fate took a hand.  Another burn survivor, a woman named Rose Dean, 45, a nurse from Gainesville, who had been scalded over 55 percent of her body as a 19-month-old when a vaporizer’s hot content fell on her, came to the school’s front desk while Smith was working and asked for massage therapy for her scars.

With permission from the school, Smith began an independent study project with Dean. For six weeks, in 15-minute sessions, she massaged contractures on Dean’s arm. Dean, who for more than 40 years had not been able to flatten her right hand on a surface, was now able to.

More importantly, the relationship between the two women blossomed into a game of “What if,” hypotheses of what life would look like if massage were a part of a burn survivor’s care. “Massage is not incorporated in any [burn] aftercare,” Smith says. Doctors typically do not recommend or prescribe it.

“As Nancy was massaging me, it came to me—what if I had had massage on a regular basis during my formative years? Would I have needed surgery when I was seven?” says Dean. (Dean had follow-up surgery when she was seven, and nearly died from an operating room infection). She firmly believed not.

Joyce Welch, an administrator at the Shands burn unit, had been trying to recruit Smith to volunteer as a counselor at Camp Amigo, a burn camp for children, sponsored by southeast Florida firefighters. Each year the camp hosts approximately 40 children, ranging from 6 to 18 years old. The camp assigns a counselor to each child—usually a firefighter or adult burn survivor.

One day, Dean and Smith had a new “what if” question: What if, instead of going as a counselor, Smith went as a massage therapist?

Smith contacted the camp’s directors and was given permission to bring her massage table to the next summer’s camp in July 2005. She also received permission from 18 of the attendees’ parents. In July, she took a week’s vacation from her job and headed off.

Smith arrived in the panhandle town of Cape San Blas in the fully accessible Billy Jo Rish State Park one day ahead of the kids, and prepped in a cabin that sat on a stretch of white sandy beach with mile-high sand dunes and sea grasses. She knew she was to work on 18 children, ages 8 to 17, who were all six months post-burn. What she didn’t know is how they’d respond.

The children were leery, she says. Many would walk into Smith’s cabin—often from a beach game or arts project—and ask, “What are you going to do to me?” Smith didn’t say much. She simply showed them her compression garments and injured leg and said, “Massage helped me. I hope it will help you, too.”

She also told the children that they could say stop at any time. “They had the whole power,” she says. By the end of the week, the kids had opened up, she says, even the youngest ones. One young girl shared how she was teased at school. Another said that the scars on her feet usually scared those who saw them.

After the week’s sessions, Smith drew a series of faces—from frowning to smiling. “I asked them to point to a face before and after session,” she says. “The second child on the table—an 11-year-old softball player who had burned the back of her knees on a mini-bike and had range of motion issues—said that we needed another category. ‘Happy Plus,’ she said, ‘because I feel great.’”

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