A 19-year-old student's persistent knee pain, initially dismissed as a minor ache, turned out to be a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer, necessitating a life-saving leg amputation.
Alicia Ortstad, a salad shop worker from Uppsala, Sweden first noticed the pain in the summer of 2023. By late August, her leg had dramatically swollen, resembling a bowling ball and making it impossible to bear weight.
However, Ortstad’s complaints were initially brushed off by doctors.
“They just told me to rest and prescribed paracetamol,” she recalled. “But it only got worse.”
She said her pleas for an MRI scan were ignored and, instead, doctors gave her cortisone shots to manage the pain.
As her knee continued to swell, she started experiencing frequent colds, blue veins on her knee, extreme fatigue, and trouble concentrating in class.
“I was falling asleep mid-lesson – that wasn’t like me,” she said.
“The first thing the doctors said to me was to completely forget school for now.
“But I was only half a term away from graduation.”
After finally getting a MRI scan in December 2023 the devastating diagnosis was revealed: osteosarcoma. Doctors informed her that amputation was the only way to prevent the cancer from spreading.
In January 2024, with the support of her boyfriend, Simon Pettersson, a 21-year-old who has also had a leg amputation due to osteosarcoma, Ortstad underwent the life-altering surgery.
“Now that I look back, there are many signs that I completely ignored that I now know were indications that something was wrong with me,” Ortstad said.
After a few days she learned to stand up and later walk with crutches – in fact Ortstad and her family thought the recovery speed was a miracle.
However, just a week later, she had to undergo a second surgery to remove a metastasis, the spread of cancer cells from the original tumour to her lungs.
“It was another setback, and I could no longer walk again because of the pain in my upper body as well as my lower – but a week later, I was back on track,” she said.
Ortstad would continue to study from hospital and home after her surgery, graduating in June 2024.
She said going through such an ordeal in her late teens has shaped who she is today.
She urges others in her position to seek professional help as soon as they experience symptoms, adding: “I wish that people educated themselves more about the symptoms, especially the pain while resting, since it’s very common for osteosarcoma.
“Some doctors are not very informed about this rare disease, and I want them to eliminate the possibility of this disease by doing an MRI at the first symptom.”
Alicia has spent the past year recovering and getting used to her new prosthetic leg, and she now posts on TikTok, gaining more than 7.5 million likes for her videos so far.
