 Hello there my beautiful internet friends welcome back to my channel. Thank you for joining me here today You are joining me on a day that I am not feeling particularly splendid Which is why I've made myself a cup of hot water honey and a lot of lemon juice This is what I swear by when I do not feel well I don't know that there's actually any scientific evidence backing it But I can tell you it always makes me feel better home remedies with Joe if you ever don't feel great You feel cold coming on honey hot water and lemon juice. It's my patented recipe today I wanted to talk to you guys about my TMR procedure, which is targeted muscle re-innovation It's a cool nerve procedure that they have developed and they do for some amputations and in my most recent amputation Which was exactly five months ago today, which is kind of crazy They did this for me a very talented surgeon who specializes in TMR procedures was brought into my amputation surgery and Performed it now. There is a high likelihood that it would work. There's always the chance that it wouldn't It's nerves so you can never really tell what's gonna happen But I'm gonna talk a little bit about that procedure today about what was the expected outcome and what the outcome has been so far And what things look like moving forward as we dive into this riveting topic if you want to give this video a thumbs up for me It's not to help the video get out to more people this time or even you know for my own narcissistic pleasure It's because I haven't told that there's a possibility my leg could grow back if this video gets enough likes There's no scientific evidence saying that that won't happen because they actually have never done any studies on it I should probably take a nap and not film this video. Let's talk about targeted muscle Renovation surgery so exactly five months ago. Like I said, I had my leg cut off a second time This is a little bit misleading because I only had two additional inches taken off of it But it kind of restarted the entire healing process and as we were in the decision-making process for what we were gonna Do to make my leg better so I could actually get a prosthetic leg and walk on it It was suggested that I have this procedure done because I dealt with a lot of pain And I was dealing with a lot of phantom pain now if you don't know what phantom pain is I will link a playlist down below that deals with it specifically, but Phantom pain is not in your head I talk about phantom pain a lot of people think because of the word that it's made up or because your leg isn't there anymore That there's no way you can have actual pain signals But weirdly that's not the case the best way that I've heard phantom pain and sensation explained to me is that Basically when you're born your brain has a map of your body parts So it knows that my hand is supposed to be here and I should have five fingers and they should wiggle like this And the same is true for the other side and the same is true for my legs now when a part of my body is removed They don't suddenly give that signal to my brain like my leg isn't cut off in the nervous center in my brain as well So it keeps trying to send signals down there and unfortunately there's nothing to send it to so the signals get a little bit Screwed up and you feel a screwy thing that is not a thoroughly scientific explanation But it's a pretty accurate description of what happens after I had my initial amputation I had a lot of electrical pain It felt like there was like a cattle prod that'd be pressed up against the bottom of my foot that didn't exist anymore And I would jump and sometimes like shriek a little bit It was very painful and weird then I would have almost like a knife sensation like someone was cutting the inside of my foot Like like very specifically right there and then the outside of my ankle like very specifically right there phantom pain and sensation is often Very targeted in what you feel so what this TMR procedure does is it splices your nerve endings? The big ones into your muscles. It basically gives your nerves something to do Instead of firing into nothing they're firing into a muscle this insertion of nerve and the muscle tissue also decreases the likelihood of neuromus forming Which is never a good thing and so they went ahead and did this for me and the thing with nerves is that they take a long time to heal They take months to heal so I was told that I would notice a difference if Difference was to be noticed within three to six months I was a little bit concerned going through a second amputation that my phantom pain would get worse or it would change or fill in the blank That's very unpredictable and it did change actually but not by much I noticed that in the first couple months after my second amputation. It was very similar But it would almost come in like more Concentrated blocks, so it would like shock me multiple times within like two minutes and then it would go away But I figured that this was all part of the healing process I also get really bad muscle cramps like my calf will cramp down below where it's been taken off the knife sensations have pretty Much gone though. They do still stick around some I still totally feel my foot and my ankle I still feel like I can move it even though obviously I can't so we are now officially at five months out Which means yeah, I mean technically I have 30 days left until the end of six months Which is the furthest possible edge of what they said that I might expect to see something by but I think at five months I have a pretty good Expectation of whether or not this should be working and I can conclusively say it's not done a darned thing If anything I would say that the electrical pain is a little bit worse than it was I'm really bummed out to say that and I'm not I'm not like married to that conclusion I'm very open to the possibility of it Magically getting a lot better in the next 30 days, but if there's been absolutely no improvement And if anything it's gotten a little bit worse in the past five months I don't have super high hopes that anything is going to miraculously change This is a big bummer for a couple different reasons. I was really hoping that the phantom pain might get less Obviously, which is why we did it to be totally honest with you It's kind of hard for me not to sink into a mindset of like well, of course it didn't work It never works because I've never had surgeries that went particularly smoothly or well or really fixed the issue that was Meant to be fixed. I have actually had wrist surgery I don't know if you can see the scar right there that went wonderfully well It fixed the problem no issues But aside from that pretty much every surgery I've ever had has been riddled with issues usually there's no explanation for it Ever since I've been like an older teenager. I've followed doctors orders. I've done what I'm supposed to do I'm otherwise a generally pretty healthy person and it's weird to me that things don't work fairly consistently enough So that my doctors have like made comments about what a weird anomaly I am with stuff and I don't want that pattern to continue. I really don't so we'll see like I said I'm very open to it changing and getting better But I don't necessarily see that happening because we've had a pretty long period of time to test it out within now Obviously, this is not the end of the world. I'm still functional I could go on a couple different medications to help with it But I have been on those medications before they don't do wonderful things for me And I don't want to introduce more medications into my body when I don't absolutely have to first so for the time being I'm just just dealing with it, you know, if you are wondering. Yes, I do do mirror therapy I'm actually gonna start stepping that up a little bit more I noticed that what my first amputation it did help a lot in the initial couple months to get things to die down And I haven't been super consistent with it because after that it didn't seem like it did a whole lot It's not really instant gratification for me like it is for some people So it's hard to stay consistent with it But I'm gonna I'm gonna start that back up here more consistently and see what happens with it See if I can get things to calm down a little bit I'm still really glad that I did it that I had that procedure I'm sort of of the opinion that unless there's a significant reason not to it's always better to take a Chance to have like a hope of a better future or have hope of less pain It wasn't easy to go through the recovery for that part of the surgery, but I'm really glad that I did it I'm really glad that we tried it that we like took that shot, but it doesn't work for a hundred percent of people It does work for the vast majority of people as of now and I will keep you updated if this changes as of now It looks like I'm in the group of people that it doesn't Really do much of anything for I will say though when I did have my ankle There was a patch of skin that was like I don't know like the size of a quarter Maybe that didn't have any feeling after a number of surgeries They had like cut through nerves and skin and so on and so forth so often that it was like I'm just not gonna feel anything anymore peace and I figured that that would never come back because it had been like a year and a Half nerves don't heal after a year and a half generally speaking and it did it actually like that feeling came back So maybe my nerves just take a really long time to heal I don't actually think that's accurate, but um hey, I'll hold on to that little tidbit of hope in the meantime And with that I think I pretty much reached the end of my speaking abilities for the day I really appreciate you guys listening and following along on my journey I know that so many of the people who are here right now have been here for that surgery and for the surgery that was before that and Even some of you guys were here when I first started this channel and had my initial amputation and that blows my mind I'm so so so thankful for you guys. So thank you for being here. Thanks to my patrons who make these videos possible I really appreciate your support more than you know Thank you for being a part of making all of this happen Thank you watching this video right now for taking a few minutes out of your day to sit here and listen to my story If you enjoyed it, I'd love it if you did give it a thumbs up or hit subscribe If you'd like to see more of me and your YouTube feed. I appreciate it I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video