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As she walked across the empty intersection of Kearny and Post, an underground Pacific Gas & Electric transformer exploded. It blew a manhole cover 30 feet into the air, buckled concrete and caught the Internet Marketing Executive in a blast of superheated smoke and flame.She lay stunned, crumpled and scorched on the street, with third-degree burns on her hands, face, back and ankles.And just as suddenly, her luck changed again.As Nash picked herself up from the street, she opened her eyes and remembered thinking, "Thank God, I can still see." A female bicycle messenger gingerly guided her to the curb side.
A San Francisco Fire Department ambulance crew, driving nearby after just completing a run, heard the explosion and sped to the scene."I think I need to go the hospital," Nash said, standing with her hair singed off, her face blackened and her right arm shattered. Nash was delicately and quickly whisked up one-way Pine Street eight blocks to Saint Francis Memorial Hospital – one of only two hospitals in the Bay Area with specialized burn units. She was wheeled through the Emergency Department door at 9:06 a.m., five minutes after the blast. Doctors slipped her into a drug-induced coma and battled to save her. Two-and-one-half weeks later, she woke up. Then her marathon recovery began.
A team of Saint Francis Surgeons performed five major surgeries on Nash. She was burned over 40 percent of her body. Her burned skin was first replaced with high-tech materials made of collagen, which served as a foundation for the skin harvested from healthy parts of her body and grafted about two weeks after the injury. Then the long and painful process of restoring mobility began. Lisa learned how to walk again with the greatest challenge of restoring full mobility to her hands.Nash credits her good health today to the staff at Saint Francis and to her husband and daughters for their love and constant presence at her bedside and throughout her recovery. Today she serves as the CEO of Blue Planet Run, an organization that brings clean, safe drinking water to third world counties.
Throughout her ordeal, Nash has drawn strength from her religious faith, and perhaps surprisingly, is thankful for her luck. "The angels were not looking after me during the explosion, but they were afterward, " she said.Nash’s story is one of literally hundreds that have been told over the 42 year history of the Bothin Burn Center at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. Your support will allow burn center staff to continue to be a Bridge to Hope for hundreds more Bay Area families during their critical time of need.or a split second on a sunny Friday morning in downtown San Francisco, Lisa Nash was the unluckiest woman in the world.