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She is a very strong woman. Must be really tough for her but I'm glad she has the support of her family! Best of luck to her!Giant Tanya Angus suffers from a rare disorder which caused her to grow to huge proportions, but now doctors have found a cure for her life-threatening problem.
Tanya, 31, has acromeglia, a rare form of gigantism, which causes the body to overproduce growth hormone.
Sufferers are very tall, but in Tanya's case, her entire frame has grown in proportion, leading to her putting on 24 stone, while her shoe size has doubled from a standard UK size 6, to a UK14.
She has also grown more than a foot, and now towers over everyone else at 6ft 8ins.
Doctors told Tanya if they couldn't halt her rapid growth, her heart would be put under too much stress and give out.
Tanya's quest for a cure will be documented on I'm Turning Into A Giant on Channel 4's Bodyshock series at 10pm on Tuesday.
Tanya, from Las Vegas, Nevada, was only struck down with the unusual illness in her late teens.
Looking back on pictures of herself as a pretty, slim, teenager, it's hard for Tanya not to get emotional about how the disorder has changed her body and her life, beyond all recognition.
'I was 5ft 8ins and a size 10, I loved horseriding, dancing and just having fun like a normal teenager,' she said.
'I had a boyfriend, an apartment, a job I loved, I just loved my life.'
Then one day, Tanya woke up and found her shoes wouldn't fit, forcing her a buy a new pair.
Putting it down to a late growth spurt, she shrugged it off and carried on with her life, but then a few weeks later, the new shoes didn't fit either.
And it wasn't just her feet that were changing, looking at herself in the mirror she noticed her face had become wider and even her hands were bigger.
Her growth was matched by constant pain in her back, and flu-like symptoms.
By the time she had turned 20, Tanya was 6ft 1ins tall, a size 14-16 and had size 10 feet.
Worried, her family took her to the doctor who immediately diagnosed her with gigantism and referred her to a specialist.
'When he told me I had acromeglia I felt like the floor had been taken out from under me,' Tanya said. 'He explained I would keep growing and that I needed more tests.
'The more I found out about what was going to happen to me, the more scared I was, but I was also relieved because at least we knew that there really was something wrong with me, and it wasn't my imagination.'
The change in her height was rapid and she began to lose the feminine shape she had treasured before.
'It sounds horrible, but someone at work actually asked me if I used to be a man,' she said. 'I'd started to look so big, it had raised doubts in people's minds about what sex I was.
'My voice had also changed and become deeper. I was devastated and started to feel quite shy and insecure.'
After an MRI scan, doctors found a huge tumour in her brain the size of an orange, wrapped around her inner carotid artery, causing an overproduction of growth hormone.
They told her it was too large to operate on and nothing could be done.
But her determined mum Karen found a doctor who would carry out the operation.
In 2003, she underwent surgery to remove most of the tumour, although small parts of it were too difficult to separate from her brain.
Tanya was then given a cocktail of drugs to try to control the huge amounts of growth hormones still in her body.
She had a count of 3,000 of the hormones, compared to an average person's of just 250.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/wor...taller-gained-24-stone-20s.html#ixzz0pooK3qaz
