‘I felt sick that he was near my mum’: a top amputation surgeon had his own legs removed due to a fetish. Were his patients safe?

Of all the things that happened in the fraught days after 72-year-old Liz Spooner had her leg amputated at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro in 2022, one memory remains vivid in the mind of her daughter, Faye Harrison. Liz’s surgery had taken much longer than anticipated, Faye remembers, and, delirious after the anaesthetic and morphine, Liz had begun to refuse food and medication. That’s when Faye was ushered into a side room with a consultant surgeon.“He was smiley. He came across as quite charming and caring,” Faye recalls. He ran through a long list of the medications Liz was taking, and began explaining why she needed them. “I remember looking down – you look down at the floor a lot when you have these kinds of conversations – and I noticed he’d got metal sticks coming out of his trouser legs.” Faye blinks in disbelief at the memory. “I thought, blimey, he’s operated on my mum, but he’s also an amputee.”Neil Hopper was a celebrity in the world of vascular surgery – the specialist field involving veins and arteries, and therefore amputations. He had been a consultant for a decade by the time of Liz’s operation, and had received awards for clinical excellence. But in May 2019, following suspected sepsis, Hopper himself had had to undergo double below-the-knee amputations. When he walked into the surgical theatre on prosthetic legs in January 2020 ready to perform amputations on patients again, a BBC camera crew was there to film his heroic comeback. He talked about his experience of sepsis on the sofa of ITV’s This Morning, dressed in shorts that proudly exposed his prosthetics. Using the handle @bionicsurgeon, he had documented his experiences as a disabled doctor on social media. He even applied to the European Space Agency, hoping to be the world’s first astronaut with a disability. He won multiple accolades: named one of the coolest people in Cornwall, and one of the bravest people in Britain.Hopper tells his story on ITV’s This Morning, 6 March 2020. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/ShutterstockBut Faye chose not to mention his legs during their 15-minute conversation about her mum. Instead, she made some small talk: noting Hopper’s Welsh accent, she declared Cornwall’s beaches to be far better than Wales’s. It was an odd scenario, but there was at least something reassuring about knowing the man caring for her mother was himself an amputee. “I remember thinking, God, he must have amazing empathy.” Coming out of the side room, Faye told her husband about the extraordinary surgeon she’d just met. “It’s awful, really, but I remember saying, ‘He’s got prosthetic legs – and his name’s Hopper.’ Because, in times like that, you look for anything that’s going to make you laugh.”It had been a harrowing few days for Liz’s family, but the ordeal had begun a year earlier, when she had fallen on the beach and broken her leg. A people person, Liz was a former nurse who went on to manage a children’s home in Birmingham for 12 years before settling in Cornwall. After her husband’s death in 2009, she filled her days volunteering at the RNLI shop in Rock. It was after a shift there, while walking her dog, that Liz tripped and broke her left femur. It didn’t heal properly and, six months later, she had surgery to insert a metal rod in her leg, which then became infected. In July 2022, Liz was told she needed to make a choice: she could either take antibiotics for the rest of her life, which could stop working, or have her leg amputated. “Get rid of that bloody leg, get rid of the infection, and she’s going to be all right, we thought,” Faye says.Liz Spooner (on the right) and her daughter Faye Harrison in Spain in 2017. Photograph: courtesy of Faye HarrisonThey were expecting the procedure to take five or six hours, but Faye tells me it took 11 or 12. Recovering on the high-dependency unit, Liz became paranoid and delusional. She told Faye there were ghosts in her room; that people were out to get her; that she was being secretly filmed. “The nurses and doctors were saying this was normal after a very big anaesthetic and all the morphine. But she was never really out of that state. She was never my mum again, after that operation.” Liz contracted hospital-acquired pneumonia and, nine days after her surgery, she died.Faye says that no one ever explained why her mum’s procedure had taken so much longer than anticipated. If it had been shorter, she wondered, then perhaps Liz wouldn’t have been so delirious afterwards, or she might not have been in hospital for long enough to contract the pneumonia that killed her. But Liz had always believed in the NHS, and so does Faye – she works as an NHS speech and language therapist. She assumed her mum had just been very unlucky. “No reason to doubt anything,” she shrugs.Then, three years after her mother’s death, in September 2025, Faye was listening to the news on her drive into work, and heard Neil Hopper’s name. He had been jailed after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud by false representation and three counts of possession of extreme pornography. The fraud conviction related to claims he had made on his health insurance after the amputation of his legs. Hopper had not had sepsis, after all – the injuries that caused his legs to be amputated were self-inflicted. He had deliberately harmed himself, because he had an amputation fetish.Faye felt as if she was going to vomit. “Oh my God, I felt sick that he was even near my mum.”Royal Cornwall hospitals NHS trust issued a statement on the day Hopper was convicted. “We want to reassure the public that our exhaustive investigations have found no evidence whatsoever to indicate any risk or harm to patients at our hospitals,” it said. But Faye was not reassured.“Who gets their own legs amputated when there’s nothing wrong with them? And then to think that he’d been a doctor. And then – even worse – a doctor who does amputations on other people.” Questions swirled around her head. “My mum was in that operating room a very, very long time. Was something going on?”Across Cornwall and beyond, Hopper’s former patients and their families were asking similar questions. Here was a surgeon prepared to lie for years to his colleagues, his patients, the wider public and his closest family about the nature of his injuries – a man who, on the basis of the extreme pornography he was convicted of possessing, revelled in seeing people in excruciating pain. How could anyone be sure he never posed any risk to patients?Hopper was resolutely silent after his arrest in March 2023. He replied “No comment” in his two police interviews; he did not speak in court. Perhaps the greatest insight into his mindset and character comes from comparing his Bionic Surgeon persona with the truth that emerged during his criminal trial and his fitness to practise tribunal. The contrast lays bare the questions that remain for Hopper’s former patients – and his former employers.On the surface, at least, Hopper seemed to live a very conventional life before he lost his legs. The son of two nurses, he grew up in Aberystwyth and Swansea, and attended a private boarding school. He studied at University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff, earning a first-class degree in anatomical sciences and an honours degree in medicine. He met his future wife at medical school, they had a son and a daughter, and the family went to Australia for a year, where Hopper worked as a vascular surgeon in Sydney, before returning to the UK in 2013 to be a consultant surgeon, both at the Royal Cornwall hospital and at the Duchy, Cornwall’s only private hospital. “I developed a keen interest in vascular surgery mainly because it was reconstructive, no two operations were the same, and having to operate on all parts of the body provided the variety to keep my interest,” Hopper told the Western Mail in 2021.In April 2019, so his story went, Hopper and his daughter became unwell during a family camping trip. “My daughter got better but I didn’t, so my family abandoned me at home thinking I had a stomach bug. I started feeling a bit achy so took some paracetamol and went to bed,” he told Cornwall Live in February 2020. Later, Hopper’s wife and children were away visiting his in-laws; when his wife rang him and he “spoke gibberish” on the phone to her she called a friend, who went around to check on him, found the front door open, and called an ambulance. “The next thing I remember is being in intensive care,” Hopper continued. “I remember my feet hurting a lot.”Hopper told doctors he’d been vomiting and had diarrhoea. He underwent extensive testing, with medical staff bewildered by the cause of his condition. In the end, they suspected sepsis. “I could see my toes had gone blue so at that point I knew where I was sort of headed,” he later told the BBC; blue skin on the soles of the feet is a recognised sign of sepsis. For two weeks, his medical colleagues tried to improve the blood supply to his legs. He was transferred from the Royal Cornwall hospital to Derriford, a specialist training hospital, for hyperbaric oxygen therapy. But it was in vain. Once amputation began to look inevitable, he said to the BBC, he “couldn’t help but imagine the mechanics” of what it would entail. “The thought of power tools being used on me was icky.” Hopper’s toes were removed on 10 May, and, when that wasn’t deemed enough, he opted to have both his lower legs removed on 17 May.“I’m now a bilateral below-knee amputee, which is quite ironic, given my job,” Hopper declared in the first video uploaded to his YouTube channel, six months after his surgery; he had already started calling himself the Bionic Surgeon by then. In another video, uploaded to mark his first year as an amputee, he boasted about getting an all-expenses paid trip to Salford to be on BBC Breakfast. In early 2022, he revealed he was undergoing assessments in Hamburg with the European Space Agency, in a bid to become the world’s first para‑astronaut; he