Strangers gave me £10,000 so I could have my leg cut off
A YOUNG woman will have her leg amputated this month after raising £10,000 to pay for the controversial procedure.
The NHS refused to carry out the operation on Hope Gordon because experts feared it would not cure her intolerable pain.
However, the 21-year-old will have her limb removed at a private hospital after a crowdfunding campaign.
The Scottish sportswoman has suffered from a neurological pain condition for nearly a decade.
She has been begging for an amputation on her left leg since she was 16. Surgeon Steve Mannion will perform the operation on April 29.
Miss Gordon said: ‘I just want to get it over with and my leg off.
‘I have no second thoughts – it has been a long, long wait. I thought about having the operation two years before I finally decided in 2011 that this is what I wanted.
‘Nothing has changed my mind since. I’m more determined.’
The rower and swimmer was playing football in her PE class when her leg became sore and the pain gradually increased to the point where she could not walk.
She has described it as a ‘burning, stabbing sensation’.
Miss Gordon, who is originally from Rogart, Sutherland, was eventually diagnosed with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS).
Internet searches led her to Mr Mannion, whom she met in October.
The student, who now lives in Stirling and is studying for an HND in Health, Fitness and Exercise at Forth Valley College’s Falkirk campus, said: ‘Mr Mannion wanted to do it on the NHS. When they refused, he said he would do it privately. I just had to raise the money.
‘I feel the NHS did not consider my case on an individual basis. I never met the person who made the decision. I was left with no choice but to go private. I felt like I don’t even have a right to my own body.’
Mr Mannion, founder of the Feet First Worldwide charity, will sever the athlete’s limb above her knee at Spire Fylde Coast Hospital at Blackpool, Lancashire.
Miss Gordon said: ‘There are no guarantees and we don’t know how much pain will be left. I can’t remember never being in pain and it is chronic pain.
‘I take painkillers but they can’t really treat the nerve pain. Other people have had this operation with very good results.’
Unfortunately, Miss Gordon has had to give up on representing Britain at the Paralympics in Rio in September, but has instead set her sights on swimming for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games on Australia’s Gold Coast in 2018.
Her Christmas crowdfunding appeal raised more than £9,000 of the £10,000 needed, with family and friends securing the rest.
She has received ‘tremendous’ support from parents John and Rona as well as brother Sean, 22, who have seen her take up to 30 pills a day in a bid to relieve the torture.
A spokesman for NHS Forth Valley said: ‘The clinical advice we have received is that this procedure is against current guidelines for the treatment of CRPS.
‘In many cases where the cause of pain is neurological, removing a limb would not remove the pain.
‘It would therefore be inappropriate to carry out this procedure locally or arrange for it to be carried out elsewhere in the UK.’
‘There are no guarantees’