amp One Step Beyond Leanne Grose lost part of her leg to cancer. Refusing to lose her spirit, she has recently brought out a fitness DVD aimed at amputees, the elderly and those with limited mobility. She tells her inspirational story.

When sexy brunette Leanne Grose placed one stilettoed foot on the ground as she got out of her car the other day, it gained some admiring glances from a group of young men nearby. The shouts of, ‘Nice legs!’ made her smile, but she wondered how they were going to react when they saw that her other leg was a stump.

Today, the bubbly 26-year-old amputee laughs as she recalls what happened next. She says she really felt for the lads, who must have been terribly embarrassed. “Their faces just dropped,” she recalls. “One of them came up and gave me a hug and said he was sorry, but it was fine. Easy mistake to make. I laughed and joked about it. If you can laugh about it you feel you are getting rid of that taboo.”

To some, Leanne’s tale may be one of tragedy, but she insists that she wouldn’t have achieved what she has if she still had both legs. No matter what life throws at her – tumours, amputations, constant pain and a never-ending cocktail of drugs – Leanne bounces back, living life to the full.

“What’s kept me going?” she muses. “My family. My friends. I’m a really lucky person. If my life ended tomorrow I’ve had a great 26 years.”

Five years ago, the fun-loving council worker’s left ankle inexplicably gave way while she was reaching for some towels in a cupboard at her home in Truro, Cornwall. She was taken to hospital in agony, given an X-ray and later a scan and told that she had a tumour in her foot. The following year her leg was amputated below the knee. Leanne, however, didn’t let things get her down. She returned to work at Carrick District Council, passed her driving test on an automatic and attempted to come to terms with a prosthetic limb.

But the pain in her leg never subsided and further investigations found that there were further tumours in her stump. This led to an amputation above the knee in 2004, which left her with a 12-inch stump on her left side. Throughout the ordeal, her family and her fiancé – accountant Paul Oxford – supported her, even though there were times Leanne told him that he’d be better off without her.

“I asked Paul a lot about how he felt,” she admits, “but he doesn’t see me as having one leg. He’s a rock.”

Their planned wedding was postponed because of Leanne’s intensive courses of radiotherapy and they haven’t yet got around to setting another date, although Leanne can’t wait to have children and says the cancer treatment hasn’t lessened her chances.

Of course there were terrible times. She wrote letters to her family, telling them how much they meant to her, before each operation, should she not pull through. On several occasions, when the pain became too intense or she was pumped full of drugs, she confesses that she wouldn’t have worried if she had gone to sleep and never woken up.

At one stage she was contacted by Heather Mills, who had found out about her case through Leanne’s former boss, a friend of Sir Paul McCartney’s cousin. “She was like me – a young woman who’d lost her leg, and that was an incredible bond,” she says of the now former Lady Mills-McCartney. “She was relaxed and it felt like I’d known her for years as we chatted away. I’ve seen many things in the newspapers, heard stories on the radio and reports on the television about Heather, but I took her as I found her and I thought she was lovely. We’ve kept in touch. She’s a great role model.”

The bone in what remains of Leanne’s left leg is too weak to support her weight on a prosthetic limb, so she may never walk again, although she remains optimistic that a solution will be found. Leanne returned to work after her first amputation, but was incensed when social services turned down her application for a grant to pay for a downstairs bathroom, which she badly needed, simply because she was working. With steely determination, Leanne organised two big fund-raising events – a ladies’ pampering night at a top hotel and a summer ball at the Eden Project – and managed to raise the £30,000 needed. She now has her bathroom.

Her profile was further raised when she appeared as a contestant on the little-known reality show in which a group vied for the job of PA to Big Brother contestant Jade Goody. She didn’t get the job, but enjoyed the experience. Recently she managed to get herself into the Guinness Book of World Records by gathering the largest number of wheelchair users on ice at the Eden Project – 47, if you fancy trying to beat it – just to set a “disabled” record.

Like some other amputees, Leanne still dreams that she has a leg and gets phantom itches in her non-existent foot. “The weirdest thing is when I’m driving, because I can still feel my leg and when I look down I can’t see that it’s missing,” she says. “I feel totally whole.”

Always a high heel girl, Leanne has since found a fellow amputee the same shoe size who had her right leg amputated, so they exchange shoes! She is also thinking of setting up a shoe exchange on eBay. Now, she has written her autobiography, Just A Step, and brought out Leanne’s Chair Workout, a fitness DVD designed for anyone, whether mobility restricted, amputee, overweight or elderly. Some of the proceeds will go to Macmillan Cancer Support.

The idea for the video came when Leanne was banned from a yoga class because the teacher couldn’t cope with an amputee pupil and she was unable to find a suitable fitness DVD for people with limited mobility. She’s recently returned from a tour of Los Angeles to promote the DVD, has become a popular guest at celebrity bashes, gives motivational talks and is taking unpaid leave from her council job to explore other opportunities.

“I haven’t walked for five years, so I’ve forgotten how to walk,” she admits. “But I’m much more active than I was before my leg came off. In some crazy way, I’m lucky that I’ve had an experience that allows me to reach for the stars. If I had two legs I’d still be doing my nine to five job.”

Leanne’s main aim is to get across the point that just because you’re an amputee, that doesn’t mean your life is over. “I hate the word ‘disability’,” she says. “I don’t think of myself as disabled. It’s not all doom and gloom. I’ll never get my leg back, but I can make other things happen.”

However cheerful she may seem, though, her future is still uncertain. Before finishing the book, surgeons discovered another lump in her stump. It’s being monitored and she has regular MRI scans, but so far the lump is too small to assess. “I do worry about it but I just fill my life with loads of great things and push that negative thing to the back,” she adds. “I’ve had pain every day for the last five years; I don’t remember what not having pain is like. It’s like a muscle ache when you get really bad cramps, but I take medication – including morphine and other drugs to help the spasms. The hardest thing is tiredness, when I’m racing around.

“But my life is really good,” she says. “There are people in much worse situations than me. I’m very mobile for a girl with one leg.”

Looks like that council job will have to wait.

Box out:

Just A Step, by Leanne Grose, is published by Green Umbrella, priced £7.99.

Leanne’s Chair Workout DVD is £15.99 from major retailers or www.leannegrose.com