A DANCER aged eight who lost her leg in a freak accident was performing again ten weeks later.
Strictly fan Alys Davies bravely battled back after her limb was trapped by her dad’s ride-on lawnmower.
She recalled: “I was filming my sister and then the lawnmower came and I stepped back and the lawnmower grabbed my leg and then it peeled my skin.
“I had a shock and I didn’t think I’d be able to do things I used to do.”
Two weeks earlier, she was on stage at a festival and was preparing to represent Wales in LA.
However Alys, of Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, was so badly injured that her right leg was amputated below the knee.
She was initially given a wheelchair — and her inner strength kicked in.
Mum Nia said: “She didn’t want anybody to help her.”
Alys was then fitted with a prosthetic leg in August and her recovery stunned medics.
Paul Drayton, at the Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre in Swansea, said: “She took to it exceptionally quickly. She was soon using it in school as well as her dance class.”
Alys, whose story features in a Welsh TV channel S4C show on Sunday, said at first she “felt totally different”.
But she added: “Now I feel like a normal kid but just with a different leg.”
Dad Dylan said of the accident: “It is a moment that will stay with me forever.
“But you can’t live in that moment and as unfortunate and as horrendous as it was, we’ve got to move forward.”
Nia added: “My initial thought was, ‘We’ve still got Alys — she’s still with us’.
“Something from somewhere came and I thought, ‘This has to be the making of her, not the breaking of her’.”
