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ALL through her school years, Sara Vornamen was called names like "midget" and "small fry" because of her lack of height. Standing at just 154cm – or five feet – she endured odd glances and snide remarks even after she entered the workforce.

So last year, she decided enough was enough and embarked on a controversial and expensive cosmetic leg-lengthening surgery.

Now, after months of excruciating pain, the 25-year-old Brisbane woman has revealed her new look.

At 162cm (5ft 4in), she says she has never felt better or more confident.

"Some people won't understand, but I was so tired of being tiny. My whole life I was teased for being short and never taken seriously," she said.

"Later, when I became a lawyer, I always felt my height was holding me back professionally.

"Even though I had an honours degree in law, it was very hard for me to gain respect because my tiny frame affected the way people thought about me.

"I looked, and sometimes felt, like a child."

In April last year, Ms Vornamen went to Russia where a team of four doctors fitted steel frames equipped with 14 steel pins spearing through her shin bones. They then broke her lower legs in eight places.

Following the $40,000 operation, she went through an agonising rehabilitation period during which tiny dials attached to the pins in her legs were turned every day to help her broken bones fuse and lengthen.

Despite the pain, the expense and the cheerful admission that "I know many people will think I'm crazy", Ms Vornamen said she was considering going back for more.

Her life changed a few years ago during a conversation with a friend.

She was complaining that, while all sorts of advanced operations were available to do things like separate conjoined twins or increase or decrease breast size, nothing could be done to make her taller.

Her friend replied: "Yes it can."

"She told me about this leg-lengthening operation she had heard about and straight away I knew that if I could, I would get it done," Ms Vornamen said.

She began to research the operation and discovered it was not available in Australia as a purely cosmetic procedure.

"I spoke to many doctors and surgeons . . . who told me that while they would do it for children with deformities or people who had been affected by meningococcal infections, they would not do it for me," Ms Vornamen said.

"They also told me I was crazy, that I could end up an amputee, that I could become paralysed, that there were 250 different infections I could get in the bone.

"I thought, `Bugger you, I'm doing it anyway.' "

In July 2001, Ms Vornamen's research led her to the Ilizarov Centre for Restorative Traumatology and Orthopedics in Kugan, south of Moscow in Russia.

"The doctors there told me that, since the centre had opened in 1971, it had performed 7000 leg-lengthening operations, some for cosmetic reasons only, and they had never had one infection or problem," she said.

In April 2002, Ms Vornamen went to Kugan. "Initially, I wanted to lengthen 10cm, but they told me eight would be better, or my lower legs would look disproportionate to my thighs," she said.

She opted to remain conscious throughout the operation, with just an epidural to deaden the pain. "I honestly didn't feel a thing," she said.

"I just put on my headphones, because the noise of the steel grinding can be a bit, well, confronting, listened to some Bon Jovi and Frank Sinatra and, before I knew it, it was over."

She still had a long way to go.

"The steel frames are there to bear your weight and to stabilise the broken bones as they grow. To help them grow, you have to use a little spanner to turn the dials attached to the pins," Ms Vornamen said.

"This causes the frames to become longer, which in turn causes the bone to become longer.

"Now, that really hurt. The pain was terrible and we had to do it four times a day because we were aiming for a growth of about a millimetre a day on each leg.

"But no matter how much it hurt, I never regretted it for one moment, not for an instant. I could see my legs growing every day and that gave me so much strength."

By December last year, Ms Vornamen had returned home with the frames removed and her legs in plaster.

In February, the plaster came off and now she says the healing process is complete.

"This has changed my whole life. I am happier, more confident and my legs work fine," she said.

"I run 2km a day, go dancing, do aerobics, I no longer have to shop at the children's department and I feel so much more confident."

Ms Vornamen said she was considering returning to Russia next year to have the bones in her thighs lengthened.

 Ms Vornamen's book about her experiences,

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