Jasmine Ramirez was born with a typical left leg. Around age two, it began to grow without a brake. By fourteen, that limb alone weighed 174 pounds. Doctors in Florida described an atypical overgrowth syndrome—sometimes discussed as a lymphomatous tumor—that did not carry the usual gene mutations of better-known overgrowth conditions. Dr. Jennifer Mayer told reporters they were still hunting for “Jasmine’s gene.”

For twelve years the family tried to keep the leg. Plastic surgeon Dr. S. Alex Rottgers of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg had treated her for nine of those years: operations to slow bone growth, liposuction, open removals of abnormal fat and skin. The tissue came back. Clothes had to be altered. Shoes came in two sizes. Classmates stared. Jasmine is the youngest of seven. Her father, Manuel Ramirez, had a standing sentence: if it ever came down to her life or her leg, they would choose her life.

In late 2025 an infection that would not yield to antibiotics made that sentence real. Her overall health was failing. On 11 December 2025 a team operated for nearly seventeen hours. They amputated the left leg and removed as much of the mass as they could, including tissue that had reached the abdomen. Afterward Jasmine herself weighed about eighty pounds. She spent weeks in the PICU, then rang the hospital bell and went home in January 2026 to her dog and sisters.

Eighth grade had already been mostly hospital rooms and home instruction. On 27 May 2026 she walked—on a prosthetic fitted at Shriners in South Carolina—across the stage at Braden River Middle School. “To be honest, I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I did,” she told WFLA. “I got to walk the stage.” She also gave a speech. She said she still had a regret about the amputation and, in the same breath, that without it she would not be here.

What she wants next is ordinary on purpose: Braden River High School, new friends, college, theater, Broadway. Recovery is not a curtain call. A prosthesis is a beginning, not a finished body. The condition that grew the leg still has no tidy name. The decision that saved her life is one she is allowed to feel two ways about.

The photographs that framed her story—one frame the enormity of the limb in a wheelchair, the other a girl standing with a walker in a hospital room—are not a before-and-after advertisement. They are the distance between a body that was killing her and a body she can take to a graduation.

Sources

• Your Observer (East County / Manatee), “Amputation of her 174-pound left leg gives Manatee County teen a new life,” January 28, 2026
• WFLA / FOX 13 Tampa Bay / CBS 12, reports on the December 2025 surgery and January 2026 discharge
• WFLA / SNN / PEOPLE / Tampa Bay 28, coverage of Braden River Middle School graduation, May 27, 2026
• Statements from Dr. S. Alex Rottgers and Dr. Jennifer Mayer, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital