What Drives People to Want to Be Amputees?

"I have no more ankle. My foot is swollen all the time," she said.

So far, doctors have not complied with her wishes.

Lilly (who also asked that her real name not be used), like Karl and Dan, said her obsession began in childhood. "I used to play that I was an amputee," she said. "In that little world I was normal. I felt complete. ... I felt good."

Lilly also knew exactly where she would want each of her legs to end -- with the right leg two centimeters longer than the left.

For years, Lilly kept her strange wish locked deep inside her, even after she married and started a family in a little French town on the Mediterranean Sea.

But her husband, George, said there were signs that things were not quite right. "She used to do things that didn't make sense," he said. "She used to bandage up her legs, especially at night when she was alone."

Lilly said when she told her personal physician in France about her obsession, he said that if she went through with it, he would have her committed to a mental institution. Eventually, Lilly confessed to George.

George was understandably shocked, but he ended up standing by his wife. And Lilly began looking for a surgeon who would help.

In the late 1990s, a British surgeon named Robert Smith amputated the legs of two physically healthy patients at a hospital in Scotland, sparking a furor in the British press.

Smith said he performed the surgery to end his patients' obsessions and suffering. "They may take the law into their own hands," Smith said. "They may lie under a railroad line, on a railroad line and get run over by a train. They use shotguns and shoot their limbs off. They really are a desperate bunch."

And Lilly was indeed desperate. When she learned about Smith, she and George traveled to the hospital in Scotland where he worked. She froze her legs in dry ice near the hospital.

But Lilly could not stand the intense pain long enough. By the time she entered the hospital, her legs were badly damaged but there would be no amputation.