After 15 Years of Crippling Pain, Woman Decides to Have Her Foot Amputated: 'Bye B-tch’ (Exclusive)

"I've lived my whole adult life in pain," Sierra Diller, 28, tells PEOPLE. "Now it's time to cut my foot off and take my life back."

After years of dealing with crippling foot pain caused by a non-cancerous tumor, Sierra Diller finally decided to put her foot down. Her solution? Amputate her right foot.

Diller, a marketing analyst, tells PEOPLE the decision came 15 years after her foot problems began. The 28-year-old Kasson, Minn., native says the pain started in 2006. At the time her fourth-grade teacher at Kasson Mantorville Elementary School noticed her limping. Her teacher told her parents, who own a dairy farm, that it seemed alarming. So, they took her to the doctor.

"The pain was mostly a result of walking or standing or basically anything on my feet," says Diller, who has been sharing her experience on TikTok. "My foot hurt so bad. Even doctors, I would tell them, 'Hey, don't touch my foot. I'll kick you in the face."

Diller spent most of her childhood years going from doctor to doctor looking for answers. While she was in elementary school, she was diagnosed with a massive hemangioma tumor in her right foot — which doctors said she had likely been born with.

According to the National Institute of Health, hemangioma is a non-cancerous tumor that causes pain and swelling and can limit the function of the foot. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons explains that a hemangioma tumor occurs when small blood vessels begin to multiply at an abnormal rate and form a mass or lump. Treatment varies depending on the hemangioma subtype. Some cases may require surgery while others just need monitoring.

For years, Diller did her best to cope with the pain. "My bones in my foot shifted around the tumor so I was able to walk. But the tumor itself (which is made of tons of extra blood vessels) would fill with blood the second it wasn't being compressed. It was very uncomfortable."

"When I would go to stand up," she continues," it would hurt because the compression between the foot and the floor was forcing all that blood out of the veins in the tumor, and that hurt all the time."

In April 2008, when Diller was in sixth grade, she underwent her first surgery in the hopes of regaining her full mobility. But there were complications and ultimately, the procedure failed. "It had a lot of negative repercussions and then it just healed wrong. I was on crutches the whole year. So I missed out on everything," says Diller, who underwent sclerotherapy injections for the pain the following year, which also proved unsuccessful.

"I was just like, you know what, this is my life," says Diller, who graduated high school and attended Winona State University, in Minn. "So I did the whole adult life thing with my foot in pain."

Related: Deion Sanders May Need His Foot Amputated Due to Ongoing Blood Flow Problems

After her college graduation, Diller moved to Florida with her then-girlfriend, Alli (the two were married in March 2020) to attend grad school at Florida State University. That's when things took a turn for the worse. Walking to class proved to be incredibly painful, which left Diller struggling to keep up with her studies.

"Everything just kind of caught up all at once," she says. "I wasn't able to attend class and I ended up deciding to drop out."

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In 2019, she moved to Westfield, Ind., just outside of Indianapolis, where she and Alli live now. Two years later, she underwent two more rounds of sclerotherapy injections, both of which failed to alleviate her pain. Another surgery in 2022 also proved unsuccessful—ultimately causing further setbacks.

Diller says it got to the point where she started to consider having her foot amputated. "I would joke with my doctors and say 'Can we just cut it off?'" she recalls. "Most of them would give me this wild look like you want to cut off your foot?"

But Diller made it clear to her doctors that that's exactly what she wanted to do — and after a conversation about what the surgery and recovery would entail, they agreed to move ahead. "When I did find out I was having the procedure I told my family one member at a time," recalls Diller. "I was educated about what I was saying and confident about my decision."

"They're all extremely supportive and proud of me for having gone through all this with the strength, courage, and tenacity that I've shown so far," she continues. "Every friend or past coworker that I have ever met in my life has had to see what my foot has done to my life and they were all aware of how badly I had wanted my foot to just be cut off to be able to move on."

Leading up to the surgery Diller posted videos on TikTok and GoFundMe detailing her decision to go through with the operation. The last TikTok she posted before the surgery showed her covering her foot in goodbye messages.

"Get tf out of here," read one of the messages she wrote on her foot. "Bye b-tch," was another, right in the middle of her foot. The video went viral with 4.2 million views.

"It was very therapeutic for me to be able to be like, 'This is it'," says Diller, who underwent the procedure on Dec. 8. "Even going into surgery, I had so many nurses and doctors who stopped and read some of the notes on my foot and chuckled, so it was good. It was just that one last, 'Thank you for ruining my life, but goodbye.'"

Since the surgery, Diller says her recovery has been going well. "I've had a little pain here and there, but honestly, it's nothing compared to what it was like before my foot was cut off," she says. "That was an all-the-time, constant thing. The new pains I have, they're something I'm learning to live with, they're part of having an amputated leg."

"I know that they'll eventually go away or get better with time," she adds, "and I know that my life now will be a lot better than it was before."

Related: Heather Rae Young Is Experiencing 'Awful, Severe Pain' from Stress Fracture in Foot

On Jan. 11, Diller will be fitted for a temporary prosthetic and start the process of learning how to stand and walk on her own, with help from physical therapy.

"Now I get to take my life back," says Diller, who one day wants to learn how to ski. "I'm ready to live. Everyone I tell is just always so shocked, but I'm like, 'No, no, no!' They're looking at this as a sad, 'oh no, poor you' grievance kind of thing. It's not like that for me."

"It's like I'm moving on," she adds. "I'm done with the sad stuff. I'm done being held back—no more!"

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