Michael Barbella, Managing Editor03.10.23
The pain came out of nowhere.
Like the flick of a switch, the ache exploded within the entrails of Asha Morris’ lower left leg and intensified by the hour. By day’s end, the Queensland teenager could no longer walk.
An MRI showed a cancerous tumor—Ewing sarcoma, actually—pressing on the leg nerve. The rare bone and soft tissue malignancy usually afflicts teenagers, though it can present in older individuals as well. “The tumour was inside the bone and into the tissue,” Morris told The Australian Women’s Weekly in December 2022, “...the soft tissue at the back of the calf behind the skin.”
Morris immediately began hormone stimulation treatment, then a year of chemotherapy that bookended tumor removal surgery. She surrendered 16 cm (6.3 in.) of bone in an experimental procedure that had only been executed once before, but not on an immunocompromised chemotherapy patient.
The technique that saved Morris’ lower leg from amputation was developed by Osteopore International Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company that designs, develops, and markets bio- resorbable polymer implant
Like the flick of a switch, the ache exploded within the entrails of Asha Morris’ lower left leg and intensified by the hour. By day’s end, the Queensland teenager could no longer walk.
An MRI showed a cancerous tumor—Ewing sarcoma, actually—pressing on the leg nerve. The rare bone and soft tissue malignancy usually afflicts teenagers, though it can present in older individuals as well. “The tumour was inside the bone and into the tissue,” Morris told The Australian Women’s Weekly in December 2022, “...the soft tissue at the back of the calf behind the skin.”
Morris immediately began hormone stimulation treatment, then a year of chemotherapy that bookended tumor removal surgery. She surrendered 16 cm (6.3 in.) of bone in an experimental procedure that had only been executed once before, but not on an immunocompromised chemotherapy patient.
The technique that saved Morris’ lower leg from amputation was developed by Osteopore International Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company that designs, develops, and markets bio- resorbable polymer implant
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