 UPDATED 6-22-06! UPDATED September 2008  
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 Every day for 21 years, Pamela Hammersley experienced sharp, stabbing pain in her left foot and leg — the leg that no longer exists.
A motorcycle accident at age 18 left the Lecanto resident with an amputated limb from the hip down and a phantom pain that left her breathless in its intensity. “When the pain came, all I could do was hold on — it was so bad. It felt like I was being electrocuted,” Hammersley said. The pain would subside after about a minute, but that minute seemed like an hour. Every day for 21 years. Now, thanks to something called mirror therapy that she began less than three weeks ago, Hammersley is pain-free. Mirror therapy to treat phantom limb pain was developed by Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Diego. He used mirrors so amputees could “see” and “move” their missing limbs. It tricks the brain into thinking the limb is really there. Currently, mirror therapy is being used at Walter Reed Army Hospital with American military personnel who return from Iraq and Afghanistan with amputated limbs. Hammersley recently demonstrated the technique at TLC Rehab in Hernando. As she sat on a bench with her right leg extended, physical therapy assistant Jamey Gage placed a full-length mirror lengthwise against her body so it reflected her intact leg. From Hammersley’s point of view, it looked to her as if she still has both legs. “Every amputee grieves the loss, so with the mirror therapy when I first saw ‘both’ my legs, it was weird,” she said. “Twenty-one years into this, I cried a little, but then you get over it. I’m just excited for what this is doing for me.” For the therapy to work, an amputee looks in the mirror while exercising the existing limb. That means Hammersley does sets of foot flexes and circular motions. “She has to use every kind of exercise that uses every muscle in her leg,” Gage said. “The key is that she has to look in the mirror as she’s doing it; she can’t be looking around the room.” Because phantom pain is a brain thing — the brain somehow thinks the limb is still there — the “cure,” as Ramachandran discovered, is a brain thing, too. Amputees watch the intact limb move and imagine the missing limb making the movements. For some reason, it tricks the brain into making the pain go away. “I was 18 when it happened,” Hammersley said of the motorcycle accident. She and her common-law husband Jack Lambert were riding separate bikes in Clearwater when they tried maneuvering around a truck that was stopped in the road without hazard or brake lights on. Their bike tires clipped and they each fell and suffered multiple injuries. In addition to having a foot pedal rip her left side from crotch to knee, she broke her pelvis and broke her right leg in seven places. She was air-lifted to Bayfront Medical Center where the doctors fought to save her leg, but couldn’t. She said the pain in her phantom limb was there from the beginning. Although it’s not a constant pain, it is daily, lasting about a minute. The rest of the time she said it’s a “dull awareness — like when your foot falls asleep, just before the ‘pins and needles’ starts.” For 21 years she’s tried everything, from pain medication to self-hypnosis, but so far nothing has helped, until the mirror therapy, which she heard about from a friend. After she researched it on the Internet, she told her pain management doctor who sent her to TLC. “When the doctor prescribed mirror therapy, we had to go online to research it,” Gage said. “It’s really amazing how well it worked. It proved so beneficial to her so quickly.” Gage said 95 percent of amputees experience phantom pain to some degree, so this will help a lot of people. Hammersley admitted she was skeptical at first. “You bet I was,” she said. “I came into it thinking, ‘After 21 years, nothing’s going to help me,’ but the pain was 50 percent less just after the first session! And now I’m totally pain free. It’s amazing to find something that works and I don’t have to do anything — my brain does all the work. All I have to do is look in the mirror, watch my leg and move it.”
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