 Good morning everybody! It is 18 days post amputation and the pain has been miserable since my cast came off. So I have been dealing with that a variety of ways and taking all the medication that I can take but there's only so many drugs that you can safely take and so there's a couple things that I have been learning that have helped deal with my pain and I wanted to share those with you because I know that there are many fellow amputees out there and people who are heading into amputations. I am new learning all of this and so I wanted to share with you a few things that have actually helped my pain so far and these are those things. So the first thing that I found really helpful in addition to managing pain with medication is gentle massage. A couple people recommended this in amputation forums but even just like high up on my thigh just really really gently massaging it. I'm actually like touching the incision itself which is more down here very very lightly but that definitely helped bring some of the pain down and I've continued to do that over the last couple days. The nerves are so traumatized that even just you know light gentle touch helps to calm the nerves. Sometimes it makes it worse and so you've got to definitely be careful. Don't do anything without your doctor signing off on it obviously but gentle massage definitely helped manage some of my pain. So when the compression of my cast came off my pain got so much worse so I went ahead and added some compression to my leg again. So this right here is a diabetic sock. I could not find any kind of men's sock that was large enough to actually fit around my residual limb here and my thigh and so a diabetic sock was the one thing we found that actually worked and then I added on top of that two ACE bandages. These are about two inches wide and definitely not making them too tight but just tight enough to provide some compression and that definitely helped ease off some of the pain and made it a little more bearable. In moments when I was able to light exercise helped these are little elastic bands off Amazon for like nine bucks. I tried to sit and do really light exercises you know kind of like upper body or with my other leg to keep circulation going moving really slowly not to like jolt or upset my injured amputated leg seemed to help sometimes maybe you're provided a little bit of distraction but helped circulation and helped the rest of my body and helped provide a little bit of pain relief sometimes in moments when I had the energy to do that. And last but not least this is something that I realized last night that actually helped me be able to sleep because I have not been sleeping which is kind of important when you're healing for major surgery breathing. When I'm in pain when people are in pain in general we tend to like tense up and really not fully deeply breathe. I realized that I was doing that and that my whole body was suffering because of it and so I started really deeply breathing like fully like five counts in five counts out and that actually helped my pain in my leg surprisingly. So I really focused on that for like an hour last night it got a little boring focusing on breathing that long but it really really helped my pain and allowed me to be able to sleep and so if you are experiencing a lot of pain it definitely helped me to focus on breathing focus on breathing exercises and that provided some relief. Those are a few things that I found helpful for pain management in addition to taking my medication. What has helped you my fellow amputees? I would love to hear out of those. I think that the compression and the breathing are the things that helped the most. So let me know what helped you. I would love to hear from you and I look forward to reading your comments. Thanks guys I look forward to talking to you soon.