Mandy Sellars – The Woman with Giant Legs

Meet Mandy Sellars, she has a condition called Proteus Syndrome, a condition that causes abnormal bone and skin development. The same condition Joseph Merrick, also known as the Elephant Man, was afflicted with.

Mandy is extremely petite, a size 8 on the upper half of her body. Her top half weighs only 68lbs, but her legs combined weigh 286 pounds!

She was born with abnormally large and misshapen legs and feet, which continued to grow at a disproportionate rate. In a November 2009 interview, she estimated that she weighed about 21 stone (294 lb or 133 kg): 6 stone (84 lb or 38 kg) for her upper body and the remainder in her legs and feet (210 lb or 95 kg).

Doctors were unable to provide a diagnosis for many years, until some doctors decided on Proteus syndrome in May 2006, though Sellar’s condition is atypical in many respects. The most famous person with Proteus syndrome may be Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”. There is no known cure.

When she was born, doctors were unsure if she would survive very long. However, she was walking at about 18 months. When it was recommended to her mother June that the then seven-year-old have her legs amputated, June refused in order to provide as normal a life as possible for her child.

At 19, Mandy Sellars moved out to live on her own. She obtained a B.Sc. in psychology from the University of Central Lancashire, and succeeded in maintaining an independent lifestyle as an adult, with no live-in helpers.[4] She gets around using crutches or a wheelchair, and has a specially modified hand-controlled car.

When Sellars was 28, she suffered a deep vein thrombosis, which left her paralyzed from the waist down for about six or eight weeks. Afterward, she had to learn to walk again. Three years later, she got a blood infection, her kidneys failed, and she contracted MRSA.

Ultimately, it is expected that she will have to have her legs amputated. When the television documentary series Extraordinary People devoted an episode to her called “The Woman with Giant Legs” (2008), it paid for her trip to the United States to consult “renowned orthopaedic surgeon Dr. William Ertl and prosthetic whizz Kevin Carroll.” After examining her, they gave her hope that she would be able to have a less drastic amputation than the one recommended by her doctors which would have severely curtailed her independence.

Her left leg had to be amputated above the knee in 2010, 22 months after the surgery her leg began to grow ata an accelerated rhythm, her limb began to balloon again, Almost straight away the stump began increasing in circumference and it became harder to fit inside the prosthetic leg. Then the stump got so heavy that it nearly broke the prosthetic leg, Her leg now weighs three stone and has a circumference of one metre.