Despite the tragedy that struck, she finally found her footing!

Jessica Quinn was eight years old when she was diagnosed with cancer and doctors amputated her leg to save her life. She now uses her foot as a knee to keep her prosthetic in place.

At the time, medics thought it was just a regular break and treated it accordingly. But after months of struggling, they realised that there was something more threatening going on.

Quinn had a rare form of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, which had weakened her femur that caused it to snap.

She then underwent groundbreaking surgery to remove her thigh bone and rotating her shin so that she could use her foot as a joint for the prosthetic.

She said, “I was outside playing with my sister, and I decided to stand on a soccer ball just trying to balance and show off a little bit, but I fell off and snapped my femur bone. I got rushed into hospital and they did surgery and tried to heal the break. They spent about three or four months trying to heal the bone, like they normally would, without realising why it had broken in the first place. But it just wasn’t healing and I couldn’t walk without being in pain, so they put me through some tests and realised I had osteosarcoma.”

The 28-year-old was then put through a brutal chemotherapy plan, and spent the next few months living in the hospital.

“But there were a few things at play. Because I’d broken my leg, it was complicated by the risk of the cancer being spread. They had also tried to fix the leg by putting rods up my femur bone, so having a bone replacement or anything like that was just not an option. The goal was simply to save my life. So yeah, I had two options: one was a full hip disarticulation, which is an amputation, and in my case, that would have been quite high in my hip socket. But that kind of gives you nothing to attach your prosthetic to, so you don’t have a knee joint, and I was an active kid, and I was only a kid, so I wanted to live as normal a life as possible. The other option was the rotation plastic, so they salvaged the good part of my leg and rotated it. I was the first person in New Zealand to successfully undergo this kind of amputation.”

Over the years, Jessica had to adapt her life and her goals, read about her and her journey in her new book, Still Standing.

Source: Agencies