A young single father had his leg “ripped apart” and amputated after falling from a motorised trike he bought as a gift just hours before. Cameron Hassall, a 32-year-old salesman, bought his father, Mike, a £2,500 trike as a gift for his birthday and decided to ride the vehicle home to surprise him.
However, as Cameron approached the family home in Sileby, near Loughborough, with his mother, father and brother watching outside, the trike suddenly skidded and – despite travelling at less than “five miles an hour” – he careered into a concrete fence post. Left with a “gaping hole” in his left leg, Cameron faced a medical nightmare including multiple amputations and treatment for gangrene – leaving him in a wheelchair and struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
His 56-year-old mother, Amanda, has launched a GoFundMe page, with a target of £10,000, to purchase a lightweight prosthetic leg and physiotherapy sessions to help Cameron get his life back and play football with his seven-year-old son again. “I sat on the sofa with my mum two weeks ago, crying my eyes out, and I’ve never let anybody see me cry,” Cameron told PA Real Life.
“The day after that, I went out to the car with my dad and I just saw the fence and the wall and that was it – I was panicking, I was crying, I was sweating – I just couldn’t pull myself together. If I have a prosthetic leg, it means I can do more day-to-day activities with my son – I can play football with him, I can go for a walk with him.
“I know it will take time to get to that point, but it will give me something to look forward to.”
It was Mike’s “all-time dream” to own a trike, so after saving for three to four years, Cameron decided to buy his father a model based on a Reliant Robin for his birthday for £2,500. On June 1 2024, the day before his father’s birthday, Cameron had bought the trike and called his family, asking them to stand outside the front of the house.
As he approached on the trike, however, travelling at less than 5mph, the vehicle suddenly skidded and “tragedy struck”. “He pulled onto the drive, probably doing less than five miles an hour, and the trike went into a skid,” Amanda said.“The fence post, which was concrete, smashed his ankle and the clutch pedal on the trike ripped his leg apart.”
At first glance, Amanda said it looked like Cameron had just broken his nose and lost a tooth, but as she looked down, she could see “flesh” and “bone” showing from his left leg. “We didn’t realise at that point his ankle was broken, but there was just blood and flesh, you name it, it was all running down the wall,” she said.“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Cameron said he did not feel much pain at first and told his family not to call an ambulance, believing he had sustained only minor injuries. While “everyone was frantic”, he said his only thought was how he had “let (his) dad down”.
“It’s something he’s always wanted, and I thought, ‘Now I’ve got the money’, I can do that’,” Cameron said. “It was his birthday the next day as well, it was a birthday present for him, so I just felt like I’d let him down massively.”
While the family waited for an ambulance to arrive, which took about 45 minutes, Amanda said Cameron’s leg was “bleeding profusely”. She used 10 towels to wrap his leg as the blood kept “seeping through”, and Cameron was then blue-lighted to Leicester Royal Infirmary, where he underwent X-rays and other tests.
It was discovered his left ankle had been “shattered into thousands of pieces” and he underwent his first surgery to reconstruct his ankle. The second surgery involved taking “a huge muscle out of his back” for a skin graft, leaving him in the operating theatre for nearly 14 hours, but within a matter of days, the skin started turning “black”.
“After a week, they realised it had all died – it had all gone black,” Amanda explained. “That’s when they said, ‘We could do another big operation, we could take another muscle out’, but he said to me, ‘No, I can’t do it any more’.”
With a diagnosis of gangrene – where a loss of blood supply causes body tissue to die – Cameron underwent surgery to amputate his left leg below the knee. Cameron regularly had his dressings changed over the following months but, in September, he started experiencing pain as the wound started “breaking down”, prompting several visits to his GP who prescribed antibiotics, along with visits to Loughborough Urgent Care Centre and Leicester Royal Infirmary.
After a further X-ray and CT scan at Leicester Royal Infirmary, it was discovered Cameron had holes in his bones, caused by a bone infection called osteomyelitis, and he required surgery to amputate more of his leg in January 2025. “I’ve said to him, ‘As your mum, if I could take your pain away and I could swap bodies with you, I would do it in a heartbeat’, but I can’t,” Amanda said.
Cameron now uses a wheelchair every day but often experiences “excruciating” pain when moving his left leg. He said he has been left with PTSD and has counselling every week, and if he sees the scene of the accident, he has a panic attack.
While Cameron initially felt “overwhelmed” by the fundraiser as he did not want to “take money away” from someone else who needs it, he now feels it is giving him something to look forward to. With a lightweight prosthetic leg, he believes he will be able to get his life back and spend more quality time with his son.
Amanda said: “He fell apart, saying, ‘I’ll never play football with my boy again, I’ll never be able to go out walking with my boy again’, and I thought, ‘If he’s got a lightweight one, he can do all of that’. “To be able to do that for my boy and to see him grab that little bit of independence back, I’d give the world for that.”
To find out more or donate, visit Cameron’s fundraising page at: gofundme.com/f/cameron-get-lightweight-leg.