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A young woman, who has just months to live, says she feels “uplifted and free” after having her left leg amputated due to agonising bone cancer.
Ellie Downes was diagnosed with stage four osteosarcoma in August 2021. The tumour was in her tibia, with pain spreading to her knee. She was initially given an artificial tibia in place of the bone. But her leg was left disfigured, and the 28 year old said it made her feel “awful,” alongside her steroid treatment making her look “puffy and grey.”
In May 2024, Ellie’s leg was amputated from the knee down and although she’s been told she’ll never walk again, even with a prosthetic, she says feels “completely free.”
Now, with less than six months left to live, Ellie is preparing to marry her fiance and will be taken down the aisle in her wheelchair. Ellie, a former police officer from York, said: “After my leg amputation, I just felt so much better – it was a completely free, uplifting moment. There is a part of me which feels sad about the wedding. I really wanted that ‘wow’ moment with everyone watching me walk down the aisle. It’ll feel different – but, having tried my dress on, I’ll still feel beautiful.”
Ellie was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and chondroblastoma [a rare type of non-cancerous bone tumour] in August 2021. She’d been sent for an MRI after months of a dull ache in her left knee. The scan revealed she had a grapefruit-sized tumour in her tibia, which would need to be removed right away.
“I started feeling like a hamster in a wheel,” Ellie said. “It was one thing after another. One minute, everything was normal – and I was living a settled, mid-20s life. The next, I spent every night in a hospital bed.” Despite trying to maintain a positive attitude, Ellie struggled to feel like herself. “I hated looking like a cancer patient. I tried wigs, but they were itchy. I wore headscarves, but I just looked too ill.”
After a year of stability in 2022, Ellie started having a number of falls in 2023, which caused irreparable damage to her prosthetic tibia. She was told by her doctors that she could opt for an amputation, if she wanted a better quality of life. On May 7, 2024, Ellie said goodbye to her left leg. She says she immediately felt “free” and loved not having to feel “a foreign object” in her leg.
Her original plan was to re-learn how to walk with a bionic leg – but just one month after her surgery, her doctors gave her devastating news. “I have tumours in my spine, which are getting bigger and bigger. They’re slowly paralysing me, from the waist down. I’m going to be in a wheelchair now, forever.”
Ellie and her fiance, gas engineer Max Dickinson, 29, were told they were going to need to bring their wedding forward as much as they can. “We’ve been really lucky, a lot of people have helped us move the day forward. It’s going to be a really amazing day.”
