Girl Now Has Basketball For A Body After Her Legs Were Amputated Following Car Crash


At the age of just 4-years-old, Qian Hongyan was hit by a speeding truck while crossing a busy road in the southern Chinese village of Zhuangshang. Doctors gave her no chance of survival. But now, 14 years on from that brutal collision, Hongyan has found a new lease of life thanks to a basketball that has replaced her amputated legs as her lower body.

However, Hongyan has not only just survived thanks to her unique appendage, she has prospered, going on to win the 100-meter breast stroke at the 10th annual Para Games. This was despite the fact that her swimming coach tried to warn her she wouldn’t excel at the sport because, without any legs, she would fail to compete against her peers.

When Hongyan was injured, doctors were forced to amputate all of her body below the waist because of the trauma she had received. Her mother, Zhou Huan-ping, who witnessed the entire ordeal, recalled the incident to the Daily Star.

“The image of my little girl disappearing under those huge wheels that were taller than she was will haunt me for the rest of my life. I saw her at the last second but was on the other side of the street and I was powerless to do anything to stop it.”

For two years after the tragedy, Qian was actually unable to sit up because she was so weak she couldn’t even get herself into a wheelchair. Doctors informed the family that, in order for Qian to become more mobile, her best hope would be to have extensive surgery that would then ultimately see her fitted with prosthetic limbs. However, the huge sum of money that it would cost for her to undergo these operations, which was predicted to be over a million dollars, meant that Qian’s mother, who only made $20 a month working in a factory, had no chance of affording this life-changing procedure.

Qian was finally released from hospital when she was six-years-old, and without her legs, her hip joints as well as her lower ribs, she simply had a pointed stump as a lower torso.

As they watched Qian struggle to move, family members tired to come up with an idea to help her get around. Her granddad, Yuan, devised a simple yet ingenious creation after watching children play basketball. Yuan cut a discarded basketball in half, added some padding that was made up of floor mats from his car, and then put her inside.

Suddenly, Qian was able to move around with ease, and she even started to use wooden handles to support herself as she rolled in any direction she desired. This helped to increase her confidence, and soon Qian went back to school, started to make friends and play outdoors with them, and began professional swimming training in 2007. Despite the massive odds against her, Qian became more and more capable at the sport, so much so that at last year’s Yunnan Para Games she collected three gold medals.

[Image via Bing.com]

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