The truth is that this is easier to say than to do, but a woman named Jessica Quinn learned how to make lemonade out of the lemons life gave her, and she is now living her life to the fullest, despite the ordeal she had to go through as a child and all the stares and hurtful comments she has gotten over the years. When she was eight years old, this woman who is about to become a mom and is now 30 was a very active and athletic kid.
But that was before she tried to show off by standing on a soccer ball, which caused her to fall and break her leg. “I was outside playing with my sister when I decided to try to balance and show off by standing on a soccer ball. When I fell off, I broke my femur bone.” She went on, “They rushed me to the hospital, where they operated on me and tried to fix the break. They tried to heal the bone like they usually would for three or four months, but they didn’t know why it had broken in the first place.
Even after surgery and a number of other treatments, Jessica’s bone still wouldn’t heal. She was in terrible pain. Doctors were confused, so they did more tests. That’s when they found out she had osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer that often starts in the cells that make bones. Jessica was given intensive chemotherapy right away, and one of the side affects was that her weight dropped to a dangerously low 18 kilograms.
“It was just the only way for me to really get rid of everything and save my life.” Jessica says, “But there were some other things going on. Because I had broken my leg, there was a chance that the cancer would spread. They also tried to fix my leg by putting rods up my femur bone, so getting a bone replacement or something similar was not really a choice. The only goal was to keep me alive.”
The doctors gave the family two choices. One was “a full hip disarticulation,” which she describes as an amputation high in her hip joint. “But then you have nothing to attach your prosthetic to, so you don’t have a knee joint. I was a very active kid, and I was still a kid, so I wanted to live as normally as possible.” The second choice was a surgery that had never been done before in New Zealand. It was a first of its kind.
It was a surgery called rotationplasty, which takes the middle part of a leg. The leg is then turned 180 degrees and reattached to the thigh, making the ankle the knee joint and the calf the thigh. Jessica said, “I was the first person in New Zealand to have this type of amputation go well.”Over time, Jessica learned how to live her life to the fullest and accepted herself as she is.
She got her confidence back and became a role model for millions of people. She is now an athlete, a model, and an influencer with almost a million TikTok fans. “I wanted to break the media’s idea of the beautiful body, which is like a cookie cutter. She told the New Zealand Herald, “My dream was to see people with real bodies who looked like me.” Jessica answered the question “Do you hide your insecurities?” in a famous video she shared. “Me when I was 8: Hide your artificial leg so no one will look at it.
“No, 29-year-old me!” she wrote as the caption for the video of her pulling down her shorts to hide her prosthetic leg and then happily posing to show it off. This woman was so proud of herself that she even went on Dancing With the Stars and made $55,000 for the New Zealand Child Cancer Foundation. “It’s hard for me to walk, let alone dance. That was the most I’ve ever gone out of my comfort zone.” She went on, “It’s great to see how my message has affected all these kids, who want to take pictures with me.”
She wrote recently about her life and all the things she has been through. Over a million people saw her post. “21 years ago today, I was wheeled into a 14-hour operation that would possibly save my life. After a long fight with cancer, my unusual surgery (see my other videos) was my last chance to stay alive. I wish I could go back 21 years and tell my younger self about the life I’ve lived since then. “I hope there are many more,” she wrote.