Girl who lost arm to cancer wins competition with left-handed art

A teenage girl who had an arm amputated after she contracted cancer has won a competition after learning to draw with her opposite hand.

Skye Duncan, 14, from Gartloch, Glasgow, with a poster she designed using her left hand, which won a hospital art competition, shortly after her right arm was amputated following her battle with Osteosarcoma an aggressive form of bone cancer. Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire

Skye Duncan was diagnosed with bone cancer aged 13 last summer, causing the bone in her right arm to become spongy.

Chemotherapy failed to halt the disease and she had the arm amputated at the shoulder.

After chemotherapy, she has been declared cancer-free.

Now her first left-handed
picture has won a hospital poster competition run by Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity encouraging young patients to stay hydrated before surgery.

She said: “I was waiting to get released from hospital and the play staff came in and handed it out and I think I just done it out of boredom, not thinking anything of it, and then my mum got the email saying that I’d won it. She was just ecstatic about it.

“I think it was the first time I really tried drawing with my left hand and it turned out better than I thought it would’ve because I thought it would’ve taken a wee while to get that back.

“Writing only took me weeks, I just kind of went for it and I was impressed with how I did.

“It was three weeks after my surgery that I first wrote, I wrote an essay.

“I rewrote it until I was happy with my writing – about three times.

“I’d just been declared cancer-free. My English teacher’s been dead good with me so I wrote an essay about telling me I’m cancer-free and I gave it to her, as me telling her that I was cancer-free.”

She continued to attend school throughout her treatment when able, at times on the one of her one and a half hospital-free days a week.

Skye’s mother, Ann, 48, said: “I was over the moon because she hadn’t drawn with her left hand, she just had to learn to write again with her left.

“It was probably just the first picture she drew with her left so to win I just thought was amazing.

“It’s just another wee thing you’re ticking off – every day you’re ticking, she can still do that, she can still do this.

“She just finds a way of just getting back to her old life as best she can.”

Skye, from Gartloch, Glasgow, developed a sore arm last year and doctors initially believed it was due to muscle pain or posture and prescribed physiotherapy.