JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I was set on removing the
tumour, so I guess, that’s why I couldn’t keep my knee.
COMM: 20-year-old Jillian was diagnosed with
bone cancer a year ago.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I had that feeling of what
if, but I was like, it can’t be. I mean, I’m 19 years old, I’m playing college
volleyball, like, how could that have happened?
JANNA WILLIAMS: Well, it’s every parent’s
worst nightmare when you hear your child has cancer. About September of last year, of 2016,
she started experiencing problems in her knee. She was playing volleyball at college and
she was at a tournament, and so we all just assumed it was just tendonitis, just over usage.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I got an appointment with
a orthopaedic surgeon and they did an MRI and, he thought it was torn meniscus, and
it came back that I had a fractured femur and a bone cyst, that he never felt that that
diagnosis was right. So every two weeks, he had me coming back and I would have X-rays
to see if he could see the bone cyst on the X-ray. He ended up asking me to go have another
MRI. And that’s when he called us and said we needed to go back to the oncologist, because
the bone cyst had grown two and a half centimetres in those two months. And so they did an open
biopsy and that is when it came back positive for Ewing sarcoma.
JANNA WILLIAMS: Well, we’ve had it twice,
because Jill’s dad had cancer in 2014, and I can remember his words exactly. It’s just
like you have an out-of-body experience when someone tells you one of your loved ones has
cancer. TREY WILLIAMS: For me, it was really hard.
It still is.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I told my parents, I was
like, I told my dad, especially. I was like, ‘You got to stop making sad dog face and
start like smiling. I’m gonna need y’all’s help to fight. I can’t do this alone.”
I know, I said, “I don’t want any crying.” JANNA WILLIAMS: She gets mad at her daddy
sometimes, because he cries. But then he also, he will just look at her and she tells him,
“I’m not an alien. I’m still Jillian. Why are you looking me like that?” You know,
I know why he is looking at her like that, because it’s just, you want to savour every
moment you have with her.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: Wait, are we all doing at
one time? TREY WILLIAMS: The time we have.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: Don’t look at the camera.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: They could’ve just had
the tumour taken out by salvaging the limb, but from research I had done, the people I
met, there was a higher relapse rate and that’s not what I wanted. So, I opted just to have
the tumour removed and I wanted the best way of life that I could get with doing that,
so I chose rotationplasty.
JANNA WILLIAMS: She’s always had nicknames,
being Jumpy and Sparky and, since she was a small child, and the other options weren’t
going to give her that even chance to do it.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: Right here is where my doctors
put me back together. My tumour was in my distal femur and so they removed 36 centimetres
of the middle portion of my leg, rotated my bottom half 180 degrees and re-attached my
tibia to my femur. So my prosthetics, it slides on my foot and the strap comes over my heel
and I just move my foot back and forth, like if it were bending and straightening, like
a knee.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: My foot is still very ticklish
and I think my grandma thinks it’s like fun to come tickle it. I’m like no, no,
no… it’s not that fun.
COMM: Growing up, Jillian was always an enthusiastic
volleyball player and even competed in beauty pageants.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I competed for Miss Texas
Teen, when I was back in high school and I loved it.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I have a lot of end goals.
I guess my biggest one that I’m reaching for right now is to play Paralympic volleyball.
The thing is, I want to compete again for Miss Texas , so, got to get my body back in
shape to where it needs to be for that.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: Don’t get my face, it might be purple.
LADY: That’s a good thing.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: It’s comfortable for you
to sit like with your leg up. I don’t know if it’s like, normally like girls would
sit with both knees up, but I don’t have the knee so I just, the foot goes in the air.
Yeah, hold it sometimes and, it’s like I talk with my hands a lot and it talks with
me, like it moves when I’m trying to talk to someone. So, I’ve had to make sure it
stays down when I do talk to people, so I don’t make them nervous.
KIMBERLY ROMERO: She is a firecracker. She
is out there. We work a lot on balance. It’s important to me that she understands her body,
the way it is now and she, I want her not to be afraid to fall. I want her to be able
to be save herself and just be confident in all her movements, especially going back to
being an athlete. So, that’s important. Life is different for her now, but she wants
to make a difference being different.
COMM: So, the transition from an athletic
Texan beauty queen to cancer patient and amputee was a big adjustment for her.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I guess, it’s kind of
been eye opening, because I’ve always had long pretty hair, I have always been the tall
pretty girl. It’s difficult being bald and one-legged, I say that all the time, but a lot
of people tend to, you know, shy away because they are scared, “Why does she look like
that or why is she bald? Is she crazy?” KAITLYN CARAWAN RORER: I mean, your hair is
going to grow back, your leg won’t but, I mean…
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: You never know, it’s modern day science.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: I have embraced it full-heartedly,
but I know people, like other people see it as a freakish thing and are kind of like taken
aback by it.
JILLIAN WILLIAMS: When I chose rotationplasty
in the very beginning, I wanted it to be an option or a way of teaching people about bone
cancer, Ewing sarcoma specifically and about amputation. My motto in life is, “I want
to make a difference by being different”, and I feel like that’s, that’s what I’m
doing with rotationplasty, with cancer, with anything I do in life.
KIMBERLY ROMERO: You don’t tell me which way to go.