During the week before my amputation, I would lie awake at night, softly crying to myself, "I don’t want to lose my leg. I don’t want to lose my leg." I would look down at my pillow and see that I had lost the last remaining bristles of my hair. I would look under the covers at my frail, sixty-five-pound body. Then I would wonder what other nine-year-olds were doing. It had been three months since doctors gave me a fifty/fifty chance to live and I began chemotherapy. When tests showed that the tumor remained, amputation at the hip became...