
Ellie Cole doesn't remember having cancer.
Or losing her leg.
Or the anguish and heartbreak her parents went through, sending their then three-year-old daughter under the knife for life-saving surgery.
She had been diagnosed with a rare tumour - a sarcoma that was wrapped around the nerves of her right leg - and it hadn't responded to chemotherapy.
Ellie's twin sister Brittany had been by her side through every hospital appointment and every chemotherapy session, and on February 14, 1994, she thought she was going to be wheeled in to get her leg amputated too.
WATCH: Ellie stars in the new Netflix documentary, Rising Pheonix. Post continues after video.
"She wanted to be like me," Ellie, now 28, told Mamamia. "That goes to show the innocence of a young kid."
Ellie's leg was amputated above her right knee, but for her there's "no sense of loss or trauma" because she doesn't have any memories of it.
"Growing up with one leg was very similar to what it would have been like for you growing up with two, I don't know any different," she explained.
"But a lot of people when they see me with my leg, don't understand how uncomfortable it can be. The socket is made out of fibreglass. It's like having a hot fibreglass shell that just rubs on your leg and cuts into your skin," she said.
Ellie thinks of it like wearing an uncomfortable bra.
"As soon as you're home, you take off your bra, you take off your leg," she told Mia Freedman on her No Filter podcast earlier this year.
LISTEN: to Ellie Cole on No Filter. Post continues after podcast.
But despite it being normal to her, others were worried about her limitations.
The surgeon had given her parents a list of things she wouldn't be able to do now that she only had one leg - things like bike riding, roller-blading, and running.