Janis Ollson and family are in magazine ads for the esteemed Mayo Clinic for a good reason: She's the first ever to be cut in half by surgeons to remove much of a cancerous midsection - and then put back together with a happy ending.
Three years ago, the 31-year-old Manitoba mother was pregnant with her second child and had been suffering years of intense back pain when Canadian doctors diagnosed her with bone cancer. Sarcoma experts in Toronto said they would literally have to cut her in half to get at the untreatable cancer, remove her leg, lower spine and half her pelvis.
The problem was they didn't know how to put her back together again. They consulted with the Mayo Clinic and the Rochester, Minn., doctors decided to attempt something that had only been tried on cadavers.
Ms. Ollson became the first person to receive a "pogo stick" rebuild, with her one good leg fused to her body with the reshaped bone from the amputated leg. Today, she's cancer-free, although she lives with the knowledge it could return at any time. She uses a prosthetic pelvis and leg, a wheelchair, crutches or walker, depending on what she's doing and where she's going.
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