20-year-old with suicide disease begged doctors to amputate her leg that made it feel like she was burning alive

A woman chose to have her leg amputated at just 20 after an agonizing condition left her unable to leave her home for eight months.Jess Burkinshaw had lived with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) since she was just 16 months old, when she developed swollen joints, fevers and severe pain and even stopped walking and crawling.But when she was 15, the pain in her right ankle suddenly became dramatically worse.Jess initially believed she was suffering a particularly bad arthritis flare-up.Instead, she was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), a condition that causes severe and persistent pain and can develop following an injury or damage to the nervous system.At its worst, Jess says the pain could feel as though she was “burning alive” one moment before being “thrown into an ice bath” the next.“I’ve never known a life without pain,” Jess, from Leeds, West Yorks, told creatorzine.com.“When I was around 14, I just couldn’t ignore the pain anymore; it was taking over my life.“We then learnt years later that the pain was due to my ankle and foot being severely damaged from my arthritis.“On a daily basis, my pain level would never drop below a seven out of the one-to-10 pain scale.“It felt like my whole foot was bruised and it was continuously being stabbed, burned and electrocuted.”The debilitating pain took a huge toll on Jess’s education and social life.She said: “It has massively affected my life in terms of studying.“I sat my GCSEs at home as I was in too much pain to leave the house, and I missed over half of my last year of school due to the pain.“I had very few friends as I wasn’t there seeing them in person to keep the friendship going.“Leaving the house has always been my biggest struggle, as I was unable to wear a sock or shoe due to my CRPS.“This meant I was completely unable to go out in winter, as the cold was so intensely painful“My lowest point during my illness was a couple of years ago when I wasn�...