As a teenager, Kelly Cartwright dreamed of playing netball for Australia, but a niggling pain in her knee forced her to give up her favourite sport.

"The doctors kept telling me it was growing pains and it would just go away," she said. "It wasn't until two years later that I went to get a scan and they found a lump."

Cartwright had a synovial sarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that forms in soft tissue. "My mum and dad and I were asking my doctor questions he couldn't answer, because he'd never seen anything like it," she said. There was little the doctors could do: "Basically amputation was my only chance of survival."

At the age of 15 she had her right leg amputated above the knee. She went on to compete as a Paralympian in Beijing and London, winning gold in the long jump and silver in the 100 metres in 2012.