EASTLAND, Texas — When Jaylin Smith stood with her champion goat in the auction pen at the Fort Worth Stock Show a few weeks ago, there was a surprise waiting for her.
I'll get to that in a minute.But the first surprise is that she was standing in that auction pen at all.Because in Eastland, an hour-and-a-half west of Fort Worth, Smith showed me the ATV that changed everything."It had just rained, so the roads were really bad, and I was probably going faster than what I should have been,” Smith said of the accident two years ago on a road near her rural home.
"So, when we went around the corner I wash-boarded really bad, and so I tried to correct it really fast. So, then we like, rolled twice. And right here is where my bone was crushed,” she said, pointing to her left shin."And my sister was there and she was freaking out. Because she tried to get it (the ATV) off of me and she couldn't because it was too heavy.""And like, the windshield's cracked,” she said of the Ranger ATV her family still uses to haul goat feed on their property. “I messed it up pretty good. And myself."That would be an understatement. Because by the time a helicopter brought her to Dr. Bryan Ming at JPS Health Network in Fort Worth, skin and muscle were dead and dying too. Because of the rural location of the accident the ATV had been resting on her crushed left leg for 45 minutes.“A mangled extremity. Type 3B open tibia fracture,” Ming said of the damage. The bones of her lower leg weren’t just broken; they were shattered, and the wound was embedded with dirt and debris.
"The next few days, they're like, 'You're going to have to consider amputating your daughter's leg.' And I told them we weren't doing that,” Jaylin’s mom Leslie Walker said. Walker, along with her husband and children, run Walker Show Goats in Eastland.
"And he was like, 'OK, we need to talk about amputation of the leg, and I just like lost it. I was like, 'What...no,'” Smith recalled."It's not something they always want to hear,” Ming said. “But it's something that I think they need to hear. That they've got a long road ahead of them, regardless what option we choose.""Dr. Ming said, 'You're going to have to consider this,'” Walker said. “And I said 'I'm not. You're gonna find a way to fix it.'"Long story short, yes, Ming did fix it: He rebuilt the crushed bone, supported it with steel rods, moved muscles and covered Smith's open wound with skin grafts from her upper thigh.
The process took two years and nine surgeries in all.
Now, the 17-year-old Smith is in a room full of trophies and banners and belt buckles from dozens of stock shows and nationwide competitions and is back on her feet with barely a limp. And, she's winning again."Oh, Dr. Ming, he's my absolute favorite,” Smith said. "No doctor would have put me together like he did.""He's so much more than a doctor to us,” Walker said. “I mean, we're forever grateful.”
So, back to that one more surprise. Smith's first trip to the Stock Show since the accident brought her another winner, a reserve grand champion goat — and big money.“At Fort Worth you sell and then you go in the back and take pictures with your buyers,” Walker said. “And here comes Dr. Ming, and I'm like, 'Oh my God, did he just do that?'"What he did was show up in his cowboy hat and add his own money to the winning bid by an investment group, Endeavor Acquisitions, LLC and Acclaim Bone and Joint Institute. This gave Smith top dollar — $25,000 — and sent a message to his patient at the same time."To let them know and to let her know how proud I am of her and what she's accomplished. Not just through this situation but everything in her life,” Ming said. "It's one of those success stories that keeps you going, when days are tough. She's definitely the type of patient that has been really special to me and my family."As for the tough country girl who has endured so much pain, her days of caring for goats might eventually come to an end.
Now Smith says she wants to become a physical therapist, for humans. Her own medical journey has motivated her to want to help other accident victims piece their lives back together too, just like the doctor who helped save hers.
