In 1976, an 18-year-old was involved in a car accident. He got into a rear-end collision with a truck that completely wrecked his own car. Surprisingly, the young man got out of the accident without injuries.
He only had a sore knee, which he thought was from the collision. But the pain didn’t go away. He was an active basketball player in school and assumed the pain was caused by too much stress.
But after the basketball season ended, the pain was still there, and he decided to visit a doctor. Four months after his accident, he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, a type of bone cancer that often starts in the knee and spreads quickly. The doctors immediately realized that his best chance of survival was to amputate his leg, followed by chemotherapy.
On 9 March 1977, five days after his diagnosis, doctors amputated his right leg 15 cm above the knee.
