Sean T Smith at UnHerd
When Ryan* arrived in Istanbul he was 5’7” — but when he returned to the UK he was 5’10”. By having his legs surgically broken and then extended at the glacial rate of 1mm per day, he had achieved his target height. Immobilised in an Istanbul hotel room, Ryan existed in a post-surgical limbo for three months to allow a fissure of new bone to form a bridge over the gradually growing gap. His stay was punctuated by regular physical therapy sessions with 20 fellow patients in one of the hotel’s co-opted conference rooms. “Some of them were screaming in agony,” he recalls.
Ryan acknowledges that his decision to pay £25,000 for a surgery that was pioneered to help soldiers recover from battlefield injuries might seem irrational. Now in his late 20s, he worked extra shifts as a waiter and freelance writer to help finance the operation. “A normal person would think you were crazy,” he says. “But I was at breaking point. If you lived in my head for the last five years, you’d understand.”
Despite having an outwardly confident exterior, Ryan’s height-related insecurity began at around the age of 16 while he was still at college and started to notice that younger friends were outgrowing him. “I remember feeling significantly smaller than my classmates, as if I was underdeveloped. There was a sense that I didn’t matter as much as the others and that there was that something missing.”