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Friday, March 29, 2024

Titanium Tough: UF junior gymnast overcomes painful shin surgery

Maranda Smith opened her eyes and screamed.

Bloody murder.

She awoke to find herself in the recovery room at the UCLA Medical Center following a surgery where she had a 20-inch titanium rod inserted into her right shin.

"I can't even explain the amount of pain I was in, instantly," Smith said. "Like the second I opened my eyes, I was in tears screaming."

The rod, which goes from just below her knee to the top of her ankle along the shin bone, was the result of a shin that's given Smith trouble since she was 13.

The UF junior gymnast had suffered stress fractures before, and the remedy was six weeks off, like clockwork, and then a return to gymnastics.

There were those stress fractures, with suck-it-up pain, and then there was the rod, a new beast that took months to get over.

"I had been hurt before, but still nothing like this," Smith said.

Burning to be a Bruin

Smith graduated high school early to be a Bruins gymnast. The Placerville, Calif., native started at UCLA the first week of January 2006.

Everything seemed to be fine until the tumbling pass that fractured her shin.

"I felt, like, a really hot, fiery pain in my leg," Smith said. "I didn't think anything of it, just, 'Aw, my shin hurts,' as it normally does."

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It may have hurt, but she toughed it out. She competed in UCLA's first two meets of the season before the pain became unbearable.

"But after the second meet I was like, 'Oh man, something is definitely wrong,'" Smith said. "You could see it on the X-ray, just a big slash in my leg. … (The doctors) were like, 'If you take one wrong landing, your leg can break in half,' so that's why I was just done."

She had the dreaded black line on her X-ray, indicating a larger-than-normal stress fracture.

Suddenly the biggest question on Smith's mind wasn't where in the lineup she'd compete, it was whether she would ever compete again.

"I basically tried talking her into retiring then," said Smith's mother, Patty. "Or even just maybe considering being (an uneven) bar specialist and not going on with the surgery."

Even Smith was surprised at the severity of the injury. She figured it was another stress fracture that would heal after a couple of weeks off.

So she sat out for a month and had an X-ray. No change.

Another month, another X-ray. No change.

Another month still, another X-ray. Still no change.

Every month from January to June, Smith had an X-ray to see if anything had healed only to find no change whatsoever.

She was then presented with three choices: take more time off and hope her shin healed naturally, get the rod put in or quit the sport altogether.

So in June, after six months of no healing, she decided to have the surgery.

"I hadn't given up on the sport yet," Smith said. "I still really wanted to do it. I'll do anything to compete again, so I chose the surgery route."

A Month of Hell

"I remember my mom, the day of the surgery, she was like, 'You don't have to get it. Do you realize it's not going to be easy?'" Smith said. "And I was like, 'No, I want to get it, because I want to do gym again. I'm tired of just waiting.'"

Smith thought it would be a quick fix.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

"When they talked about putting a titanium rod down her shin, I was speculating it was going to be pretty bad," Patty said. "I don't think she realized how intensive of a surgery it was going to be."

Patty remembers the night before the surgery. Staying in a Los Angeles hotel, she spent the sleepless night trying to disguise her nerves with support for Smith.

It was the last night Smith would be flesh and bones before becoming flesh, bones and metal.

"I didn't have any apprehension about it, nervousness of course," said Smith's father, Warren.

Warren said he even wanted to watch the surgery but wasn't allowed.

"One of her trainers down at UCLA went in and watched (and) said she was not prepared for what she saw," Warren said.

Warren recalls being in the recovery room after her surgery, when his daughter woke up screaming in that moment of excruciating pain.

"I was kind of shocked being in the recovery room with all these other patients that were recovering from different surgeries. I didn't know how to react," Warren said.

Smith's response to the surgery was surprising even to the doctors. She ended up having to stay three days in the hospital.

"I couldn't move my leg," Smith said. "I couldn't really wiggle my toes. It was awful. The first three days to two weeks, I was like, 'What did I do? Why did I do this?'"

Smith was confined to her bed those first three days. With her leg harnessed and in a full-leg cast, even sleeping was a challenge.

"When I'd be asleep, I'd twitch and end up straightening my knee and I would just lose it again because I was straightening something they drilled a hole in," Smith said. "Sleeping was awful, during the day was awful. Everything was just bad."

She remembers switching off crying with her roommate at the hospital. When her roommate was crying, Smith would call the nurse, and when Smith was bawling, her roommate fulfilled the nurse-calling duty.

Finally, Smith was discharged, but that just meant dealing with pain in a new setting.

When she finally could crutch around, she still couldn't shower properly. With her thigh-high cast, Smith would lift her entire leg over the bathtub ledge, tape trash bags all the way up to her hip and stand on her good leg with her trash-bag-clad leg out of the shower because she couldn't get the cast wet.

Crutches and all, Smith only let the injury impair her to a point.

Two years before her surgery, she and two high school friends had planned a Hawaii vacation as their senior trip. With her cast taken off, Smith crutched the beaches of Hawaii.

"Sand and crutching, I never would recommend it," she said.

Box-Jumping Rock Bottom

For a gymnast, wiggling toes would hardly seem to take a conscious effort, but that's exactly what Smith faced when starting rehab.

After wiggling her toes, she graduated to bending and straightening her knee, which took her two weeks. She then re-learned how to walk. And finally, she started jumping on a box an inch off the ground.

It took more than a year before she could run and jump normally, and it's still a challenge for her to jump off her right leg by itself.

With the titanium rod functional, life back at UCLA wasn't what Smith had enrolled early for.

"My injury took away why I wanted to be there," she said. "I wanted to go to UCLA to do gymnastics, and I wasn't able to do it. In the end, it was not a fun time doing gym."

Masking it well, Smith shocked her teammates when she suddenly left UCLA. It was three days - the same amount of time she'd been hospitalized - between her announcing it to her coaches and her leaving for Sierra (Calif.) Community College.

"It wasn't just, 'Oh, I'm hurt, I'm going to quit.' I had tried so long to come back and it just was not working, so the passion and drive just left me," Smith said.

So she thought.

Back in Sacramento, Smith started coaching at her club gym, Byers Gymnastic Center, where she coached the level-7 (out of 10) group. There she saw how much fun the girls were having, how easy it was for them to do skills that months before had come effortlessly to Smith.

Curiosity gave way to experimentation, and little by little, Smith's passion flooded back.

"I started mentioning to Carl (Moore, my boyfriend) and my parents, 'Wouldn't it be cool if I could start doing gym again?'"

But before she could even set foot on a mat, Smith had to get back in gymnastics shape.

So she and Moore, a current UF wide receiver, trained in the gym, doing box jumps.

"I didn't even act like her boyfriend when we were training," Moore said. "I used to get mad at her, and she'd get mad at me, but at the end of the day, she did everything she had to do to get it done."

Some parts of her training sessions with Moore, like bench-pressing and doing pull-ups, Smith didn't mind. It wasn't until she worked out her leg that her dread kicked in.

"I'd be jump-roping or box-jumping, and I'd have tears coming down my cheeks," Smith said. "There was no boyfriend-girlfriend relationship whatsoever (in the gym). We'd be screaming at each other."

Box by box, Smith jumped higher and higher up to a rib-high box. She never missed a box.

She credited Moore as the one who got her ready to compete at the college level again - this time as a Gator.

Smith 2.0

She remembers the butterflies when she had to do that first tumbling pass on floor exercise in practice after two years - now as a member of the UF gymnastics team.

"What if my leg just dies?"

She stuck that first pass and has stuck countless ones since. Balance beam, which she never thought she would compete on again, is now part of her repertoire.

Though her scores are better than those two meets at UCLA, Smith will tell you she's not a better gymnast because of the injury.

She wonders sometimes if she'd taken two more months off, if maybe there would have been some change.

What she does know is that her surgery was life-changing. It has given her perspective.

"I've been through injuries, I've been through times where gymnastics is not easy," Smith said.

Because of her injury, she tries to console teammates, letting them know they aren't the only ones to sustain injuries.

UF coach Rhonda Faehn believes the injury has made her a stronger-willed person.

"She could have easily said, 'Oh, woe is me, I have a rod in my leg, I shouldn't be doing gymnastics anymore. I'm going to slink off to the side over here,'" Faehn said.

"And instead, she's done the exact opposite."

In June, it will be three years since Smith's operation.

"It doesn't seem like it has been three years," Patty said. "But looking at what she's accomplished, it's just awesome."

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