TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Doctors at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida said the condition Jasmine Ramirez suffered from is very rare.
At age 2, her left leg began to grow abnormally large. And even now, over a decade later, doctors still aren’t quite sure what’s causing it.
“It is in the top 10 of my career of almost 30 years of searching, but we haven’t given up, and we are going to figure it out, and then we are going to call it Jasmine’s gene,” said Dr. Jennifer Mayer, one of the physicians who has worked with Jasmine for years to deal with her condition.
Over the years, Jasmine had multiple surgeries to treat the condition. But none of the procedures, or the medications she was prescribed, seemed to work.
“Every time we’ve done surgery to try and make the leg smaller, removing tissue, either with liposuction or with open operations where we’ve removed abnormal skin to make it smaller,” it would come back in “six months,” said Dr. Alex Rottgers, her surgeon. “It was almost like we hadn’t done anything, and it had gotten larger.”
Recently, Jasmine’s parents had to bring her back to the hospital because her condition was getting worse.
“We were thinking that it was, we will just go, and they will get a handle on the infection, and we’ll come home in a couple of days, in a couple of months,” said Manuel Ramirez, Jasmine’s father. “Well, that was not the case here.”
Ramirez said the family had “tried to do anything and everything out there possible to keep her leg, and we had come to the point where it was her life and not her leg anymore.”
Her leg had become infected, and antibiotics were no longer working.
“In the past, I had mentioned to Jasmine, if one day it would come between her leg and her life, we would choose her life,” Ramirez said.
After speaking with doctors and their family, they decided it was time to amputate Jasmine’s 174-pound leg.
“It was extremely, extremely hard, you know, to make a decision, and as parents we were terrified,” said Ramirez.
But the surgery was successful. On Wednesday, Jasmine, in a wheelchair, left the hospital while nurses and staff cheered. She also stood up to ring a bell, signaling the end of her care.
She said she couldn’t wait to get home and spend time with her dog.
“I’m feeling really, really happy that I’m going home now, and I’m really excited to see my dog, my sisters, and all of my family,” said Jasmine.
Her medical team said they will now study the tissue in her leg and the tumor that had become part of her body to better understand it for cases in the future.