‘It doesn’t feel that different’: why UK surgeons amputated this seven-year-old’s leg and reattached it backwards
Doctors say bone cancer survivor Amelia Eldred will be able to maintain mobility by fitting a lower-leg prosthetic to her foot and using her ankle as a knee joint
Not long before her seventh birthday, Amelia Eldred, a small dancer with big dreams of performing on stage, received a devastating diagnosis.
Doctors discovered a 10cm tumour in the femur in her left leg – and it had broken the bone, according to Birmingham Live. When it did not respond to chemotherapy, doctors told her parents that the limb would need to be amputated, but they had a solution to help the active child maintain her mobility, according to the British news site.
She was the perfect patient to have this procedure and even said ‘goodbye loser’ to the cancer as we prepared to amputate
During a rare and complex medical procedure this year, surgeons in central England amputated Amelia’s leg at the thigh, removed the central portion and then reattached the lower leg to the upper leg – backwards. The young girl will eventually be able to use her ankle as a knee joint and simply fit her foot into a prosthetic so she can walk, run and dance once again.
“It doesn’t feel that different,” Amelia told BBC News this week, tracing the scars on her leg. “But it is different when I have to move ’cause it’s the other way around – when I move it up or down or side to side, I go the other way ’cause it’s the wrong way around.”
Amelia, from Tamworth, a town in Staffordshire, not far from Birmingham, was diagnosed last year with a form of bone cancer called osteosarcoma, or osteogenic sarcoma, according to Birmingham Live.
Her mother, Michelle Eldred, said Amelia’s leg “gave way” while she was playing last summer, and although her parents tried to nurse the injury, her limb continued to swell.
Eldred took her daughter to a nearby hospital, and was then sent to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, where doctors confirmed the diagnosis, she said.