Milagros Cerrón was born in April 2004 in a town near Huancayo, Peru, with her legs fused by a condition called sirenomelia, which occurs in just 1 in every 70.000 births. The doctors were clear from day one: they gave her, at most, 72 hours to live.
Milagros proved them all wrong. She underwent 11 surgeries throughout her childhood and, against all odds, learned to walk. And she didn’t just walk: she danced. In 2008, she became the face of an international charity campaign that took her to the stage of The Oprah Winfrey Show in the United States, where she danced alongside Celine Dion in front of millions of viewers. Her doctor, Luis Rubio, described her as one of the few cases of sirenomelia in the world to have lived for so long.
For years, she lived with chronic kidney failure, with just one functioning kidney and constant hemodialysis sessions while waiting for a transplant that never came in time. Milagros died in October 2019 at a hospital in Huancayo, at the age of 15. She lived more than 45.000 times the 72 hours she had been given.
