A cancer survivor forced to have her left foot amputated below the knee as a final solution decided to keep her foot after the operation, and even set up an Instagram account for it, where she posts funny photos of the bleached limb. You can say that Kristi Loyall’s amputated foot is a lot more popular than she is. Its Instagram page @onefootwander currently has nearly 13,000 followers, while Kristi herself has yet to reach the 1,000 mark. But she’s not jealous, after all, she made it all happen.
Last year, 25-year-old Kristi Loyall, from El Reno, Oklahoma, was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma, a rare cancer that affects soft tissue, four years after baffling doctors with her symptoms. They told her that the only sure way to keep the cancer from spreading was amputate her foot. Despite being devastated by the news, her first reaction was to make a joke of it, asking doctors if she could keep the foot after the operation. She later realized that she actually did want her limb back, and a month after having her left foot amputated, she got it back in a biohazard bag.
“It was really peculiar. We went to pathology to pick it up and the first thing I did was move my toes,” Kristi said. “My mom was really grossed out by that. At that point I was emotionally separated from it, I had a lot of time to deal with it at home so at that moment I was excited about starting to make a joke out of the situation.”
Loyall took her amputated foot to the Museum of Osteology to have the bones thoroughly cleaned, mounted properly and joined together. The idea for an Instagram account for her foot was suggested to her by her cousin, and the @onefootwander account was born. She started carrying the foot around with her in a shoe box wherever she went, whipping it out for photos whenever she came up with a funny idea. “It is a way for me to try and make other people laugh by my situation and also make myself laugh,” she says. “I don’t have money to travel that much so it just goes with me wherever I go and if I see something or have an idea of something funny I just take a picture of it.”
A photo posted by cancer foot (@onefootwander) on
It’s pretty strange that a skeletal foot would get such a massive following on Instagram, but some of Kristi’s photos are actually pretty funny, if slightly macabre.
A photo posted by cancer foot (@onefootwander) on
via BBC
