Dealing with ailments or disabilities that affect your life is difficult enough as an adult, but dealing with any sort of debilitating condition from birth presents a unique challenge. Any child learning the same basic skills we all learned with a major disadvantage has to find an inner strength to grow that many of us have the privilege of not needing.
If there's anyone that exemplifies this strength, it's Daisy-May Demetre. At just seven years old, she is already inspiring people with her modelling career. Daisy has been an amputee since she was a baby, but hasn't let that stop her from living her life to the fullest.
When she was born, she was diagnosed with a birth defect called fibular hemimelia. Neither of her feet developed properly, as she had an extremely small fibular bone in her right leg - and no fibular bone at all in her left leg. "The feet never formed properly," her father, Alex, explained to Barcroft TV, "it came like a ball - the other one very flappy and sort of unusable."
When she was still a baby, her parents were forced to make the difficult decision to have both legs amputated below the knee, as she was unable to balance. After the surgery, she was faced with agonising pain and had poor quality plaster casts on the end of her legs - but things soon turned around.
Daisy was eventually fitted with prosthetic legs, and managed to learn how to walk, run and jump with ease. She has two sets of prosthetics - one for fast-paced activities, as well as some basic blades that she wears to school. Her father complimented her ability to adapt to various situations:
“To be honest you can put anything on her now and she will adapt that quick; she just puts something on and she will be doing cartwheels on them in about five minutes time and you think, ‘Wow it’s amazing.’”
Seizing the opportunity to share his ambitious daughter with the world, Alex created an Instagram account for Daisy so that she can inspire others.
After she caught so much attention online, her parents put her forward for inclusive modelling agency Zebedee Management. She has now walked the runway at modelling shows and has even been featured in a campaign for River Island.
Alex explains:
“I ask her all the time to be honest about being different, her answer is that she doesn’t care and you know what, that’s exactly how I brought her up to be.
“It’s good to be different, to stand out and it doesn’t phase her, it really doesn’t and it is amazing.
“She is inspirational, she is full of energy, nothing will stop her ever in life.”
It's hard to imagine how difficult it was for Daisy to deal with being a double-amputee at such an early age, but she seems to have coped with her disability in a remarkable way.
