At just eight years old, an aggressive bone cancer threatened Jess Quinn's life. When endless rounds of chemotherapy failed to shrink the tumour, she was put forward for rotationplasty, a pioneering surgery which involved removing the top of her right leg, rotating the lower section 180 degrees, and reattaching everything from the calf downwards at her upper thigh.
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At the time she was only the second patient in the country to have had the surgery.
Now 28, Quinn is an advocate for normalising different bodies.
She shares the ups and downs of life with what she describes as "a backwards foot for a knee" with her massive Instagram following.
Quinn is also on a mission to bring awareness to image retouching and the harmful repercussions on people's body image.
On top of a modelling career, and a stint on Dancing with the Stars, she's also just released a book, Still Standing.
She was very lucky to have such a supportive family at the time of her diagnosis, she told Kathryn Ryan.
“I think my parents balance each other out very well. My mum was emotional and my dad is really good at just seeing things as they are right in the moment.
“And I think that was a really great mix to give me what I needed when I needed it.”
She also found reserves of strength in herself, she says.
“I think people don't realise we all have this reserve of strength when life puts us to the test.
“We're capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.”
It became clear that this pioneering and radical surgery was her only option, she says.
“Because my cancer was in my thigh and a few other complications that I had, and the time it took to diagnose me my options were really limited.
“And so, I either could have an amputation right into my hip socket, which would just not give me the mobility that I needed and wanted to live the independent life that we obviously hoped for.”
The other option was radical rotationplasty.
“It was the best chance I had at not only saving my life, but also giving me the best possible chance at living an independent life. And yeah, it's gonna be 20 years and a couple of days, which is pretty incredible.”
It hasn’t all been easy post-operation, she says.
“I'm 28 years old and I feel I'll forever be in some kind of a rehab, constantly figuring out what I can and can't do, especially, as we get older, our bodies change.”
Her early teens were a particularly difficult time, she says.
“Not only was I coming to terms with adolescence like everyone else, I was coming to terms with the fact that I had just survived what I survived and the implications that that was going to have on my future.
“And I think that was really hard in itself, because there was the mental stress of that, as well as the body acceptance side of things, which was really challenging because, you know, I, I had to figure out how to not be held back by my body when my body looks so vastly different from everybody else's.”
While her friends were pondering what miniskirt to wear she had other challenges, she says.
“I didn't wear anything shorter than my knee for the first, I think eight years. So, I was late into high school when I first wore shorts, in my what I call my new life.”
Quinn has 200,000 Instagram followers and uses her platform to promote body positivity and campaign against image re-touching and false, unrealistic projections of beauty.
“I had an image of mine retouched. And it was a strange experience to have half of your moles removed, and not all of them, you can have some moles, but you have way too many. And for someone else to kind of point out an insecurity you didn't even know you should hold.
“And it just opened my eyes to a world that I don't believe should exist.”
She believes re-touched images should be disclosed.
“It's something I feel really strongly about and something that I believe is really unnecessary, and that everything should be disclosed, just like we disclose health warnings on food labels, we need to disclose this because it's having a huge, huge impact on young people's mental health.”
