Boating accident can't rob Lakewood Ranch woman's passion for life

As Brittany McManus begins to wash dishes, she wedges a plastic cup between her right hand and the sink. She can’t use her fingers since her right arm was nearly severed in a boating accident one year ago.

But McManus is resourceful.

She adjusts the cup’s placement and then grabs a scrubby brush, which has a handle and has replaced her sponge.

McManus, 33, scrubs for a minute and then looks inside.

“Why aren’t you clean!” she says with a laugh.

The girl who was known for moving “90-miles-a-minute” has had to slow her pace since the accident crippled her

right hand and arm.

Her right hand is curled into a grip position and cannot be straightened. She may be left-handed, but she needs her right hand more than she realized.

“Recovery is tough,” says McManus, who lives in a condo at Main Street at Lakewood Ranch. “There are a ton of things I can’t do on my own anymore. But you can figure out anything if you have enough patience and you’re imaginative.”

McManus, who has returned to her job as a marketing director for the Certified Guaranty Company Comics of Lakewood Ranch, cut her hair short because she can’t pull it into a ponytail on her own.

She walks her Pomeranian-Maltese mix, Booski, without the leash that has become too tough to attach.

Her teeth now open Ziplock baggies and her knees hold bottles when she needs to twist open a lid.

Such changes can be frustrating for McManus, who is a self-described “extremist” who has traveled the world, jumped out of airplanes, scuba dived in Cuba and swam with great white sharks.

“Of all the things that drive me crazy, it’s the most simple tasks that I feel can wear you down in recovery,” she says. “Whenever I get upset, I think about how lucky I am to be sitting here. It makes me not so mad and frustrated.”

She remembers how a nighttime boat ride March 30, 2018 near Pine Key nearly ended her life. A steering wheel malfunction sent the boat spinning and sent her sailing into the dark water. She remembers how she flung up her arms to avoid the propeller.

But when she surfaced, all she could see against the dark skyline was a stump where her arm should have been.

In her mind, she had scrolled through her list of family and friends, making sure they knew she loved them, and then thought about how her arm must be lost at the bottom of the bay. She thought about how she and Booski, who she had been holding in her left arm, would die.

“I started yelling, ‘I don’t have an arm! I don’t have an arm,’” she said.

Her friend, Cole Weaver, also had been knocked out of the boat. He climbed back aboard and pulled McManus and Booski into the boat. Although McManus thought her arm had been severed, it still was partially attached. They raced to shore and strangers applied a tourniquet.

When she awoke the next morning, she was in Tampa General Hospital, surrounded by family and friends, grateful just to be waking up after surgery.

“Her strength was crazy,” said lifelong friend Christine Birket, who hosted McManus for a month after an initial monthlong hospital stay and multiple surgeries. “She was in so much pain, but she wasn’t angry. She instead tried to focus on the blessings of it and how I wasn’t grieving her being gone.”

McManus nicknamed her mangled arm “Frankie,” short for Frankenstein, while in the hospital, but she wasn’t lighthearted the first time she ventured to the grocery store. A child in line said her arm looked gross. Embarrassed, McManus left without the sandwich she was going to buy.

“We talked through it,” Birket said. “There’s nothing that can make those types of situations hurt less unless you change your mindset.”

And McManus has.

She’s held babies and no longer worries about her ability to become a mom and care for a child. She wears tank tops, exposing the scars on her arm, and shorts that show off where skin graphs were done and arteries removed to salvage her arm. There’s no point in hiding them.

“It puts it out there,” McManus says. “It’s controlling the narrative.”

McManus has more surgeries ahead, although she does not know how many. She does know having a positive outlook is not always easy, but it’s helping with her recovery.

“I’m so grateful to be alive and there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not grateful to feel that,” she said.