For two years, Frances Kinley-Manton says she lived with arthritis pain in her hips, a condition that kept her in a wheelchair.

She wanted hip replacement surgery but doctors at Britain’s National Health Service said she was too fat for the operation.

“They wouldn’t even put me on a waiting list,” Kinley-Manton recalled.

Her doctor told the 210-pound woman she had to lose about 30 pounds before he would consider her for surgery.

Unable to drop the weight through dieting, the 68-year-old Scotland resident took out a mortgage on her house to pay for a private operation in Malta. She had her first hip operation in July. It was so successful that she’s now awaiting surgery for the other hip.

“I had no alternative,” she said in a telephone interview to AP from Malta. “NHS said they wouldn’t operate on me because I’m overweight, but I think they were just trying to keep their costs down.”

Since the first operation, Kinley-Manton said she’s lost about 10 pounds. She is now walking more and is less dependent on her wheelchair.

Ms Kinley-Manton’s doctors in Malta were puzzled that her weight had been used as an excuse not to operate. Hip replacements cost about EUR10,000 at the hospital where she had her surgery.

Ms Kinley-Manton considers her own treatment discriminatory.

“It goes against my principles to have come to Malta, but I didn’t think the surgery was ever going to happen in the UK,” she said.