 Good morning my beautiful internet friends and welcome back today. We're gonna do a draw my life You know that like internet challenge from three or four years ago. I'm hopping on that train now Don't expect any great art though. This is a white board. I'm just saying I was born in California in 1991 Making me 28 don't make me feel too old. I was homeschooled from the time I will not from the time I was born but from the time that I started going to school But my parents made sure that we had really active social lives and lots of friends It wasn't like we were just you know sitting at home in the forest and raising chickens That came a few years later turns out California is really expensive and so in 2001 We moved to a brand new state now This was pretty devastating for a ten-year-old me because I had really good friends back home, right now when we moved to Colorado I began going to kind of a homeschooled school So I started making friends here, too, but more than anything. I wanted a dog. I wanted a horse I loved animals and we lived in the forest so that that could be possible When I was 13, I saw an ad in the newspaper for corgi puppy You know those adorable ridiculous neurotic tiny little dogs I fell in love with them and the owner of the puppies told me that I could work off my debt for a $600 dog because guess what I didn't have that kind of money as a 13-year-old by working at her barn She was a trainer and boarded horses and told me that if I basically work to muck out stalls every day and Help her with whatever she needed that I could work off the debt for prints my adorable little corgi puppy So I did that. I started working with horses. I started learning how to ride now. We never had money for lessons It's really expensive to own a horse So I didn't own a horse expensive to take lessons so I never took lessons But I would get on and ride whenever I had a chance on like one of the you know Easy horses or maybe one of the girls who boarded her horse there would tell me what I was doing wrong You know in a given day when I was riding and so I kind of taught myself to ride along with the help of a couple other people By the way, this is a horse that I'm drawing I kind of feel like I'm murdering it but let's just go with it now What you will need to know about little old me is that when we moved to Colorado the day I was driving to my house I noticed this huge open field and I literally dreamed of galloping on a horse I crossed that open field one day with like, you know, my ponytail streaming behind me was a very very Cinematic moment in my head one day that actually became reality I was allowed to take the owner's horse Georgia who was his beautiful chestnut thoroughbred mare on a trail ride in that very field It was literally a dream come true It was like the best day in my entire life got out into the field with a couple of my friends And this was like miles and miles of just open field and it turns out when an x-rays horse is given a room to run She likes to run so Georgia was pretty excited that day I was not a super experienced rider, but I was doing my best and I was doing a pretty good job of it If I do say so myself, I had never actually galloped before and I swear to God it was like flying It was it was perfection to me That was until we came to a particular area in the field when that happened Georgia really took off for some reason and she tripped And when she tripped I I went down and I went down pretty hard. I fell over her shoulder She thankfully was totally fine. I on the other hand knew something was wrong I stood up and I immediately passed out Something felt very very wrong with my foot So we eventually got a golf cart to come pick me up out of the field and drove to the hospital There they took x-rays and discovered that something was very very wrong with my ankle One of my bones had broken off and shoved an inch up into my leg It was super duper broken so much so that I was like impressing doctors As a 13 year old I had to have surgery and then you know one surgery turned into two surgeries because the first one didn't work and I pretty much spent My entire year on a couch with my ankle elevated And as time went on my ankle never really healed right. It just always hurt I was popping Advil literally like candy And at school because I took classes at this local like homeschooled school. I was the girl on crutches That's literally how everybody knew me because I was always on crutches That's how I met one of my best friends and it was an interesting way to go through high school I definitely had a different experience But after a few more surgeries it was time to head off to college and at this point things were semi-stable with my ankle I was super excited and I was accepted to a private christian school in upland indiana It was a tiny tiny little town and I was thrilled. I found community there It was the best year of my life up until that point until my ankle started hurting again And I had to move home I had to give up my scholarship and fly back to colorado to have surgery to have more work done And I was pretty devastating for me because that college was was like home to me Now when I moved back to colorado, I started going to a house church And i'm just going to call this period in my life like the dark drama years A lot of stuff happened a lot of bad things happened to me and I changed a lot as a person I started dealing really heavily with mental health issues like depression and anxiety and PTSD I was a recluse. I basically hold myself up in my house and just stayed there It was not a good time I had to make a decision at that point if that's how I wanted my life to be or if If I wanted to figure out what to do with myself and as I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing I found an ad on craigslist for a german shepherd puppy dog She was seven months old named Sadie. Now Sadie is still with me And in so many ways she saved my life by keeping me company during very very dark years And by the way, if you want to know what I'm referring to I have talked about a lot of this stuff in other videos And I will leave links in the description down below during this time I also started going to counseling which is Sincerely the number one thing that helped. I was able to work through so many things I was able to figure out how to take care of myself and how to think better And I also started going to a local MMA gym mixed martial arts I learned boxing and jiu-jitsu and I think it was pretty jacked up then But I did as much as I possibly could because it gave me a reason to get to the end of every day If I made it to the end of every day, I could go to Carlos's boxing class Now something pretty cool happened In 2012 I went to a jiu-jitsu tournament and I met Brian As you guys know, Brian is now my husband We met and we started dating within like three weeks It was it was a pretty pretty quick series of events And it was pretty exciting for me But my ankle pretty quickly gave out after that We were able to train a little bit together But I had to have more surgeries, more procedures and eventually I couldn't do MMA anymore Bit by bit everything that I really liked doing was taken away from me as far as physical things And then I started having issues with migraines I would have horrible migraines pretty much all day every day And we eventually went to the Mayo Clinic to see what could be done And they definitely helped out some but I do still struggle with that In 2015, something super exciting happened Brian took me to New York City for the second time It's a really cool place, I like it a lot By the way, this is supposed to be a skyline I just like you guys to go with it because it looks nothing like that And while we were there, I turned 24 And Brian had told me at one point by my 24th birthday that he would propose to me And well, you know, I didn't have a ring on my finger at that point But I figured that's fine. I'm not going to rush him. It's going to be in his time, right? He took me out to dinner on my 24th birthday and proposed to me I obviously said yes because he's adorable and awesome And we started planning our wedding Now, I wasn't one of those girls who had like the perfect idea of her wedding in her mind I just wanted to get married. We very seriously considered eloping We literally looked up tickets to Vegas at one point because I was like, I don't want to deal with this stuff I just want to get you know, I just I just care about being married to you But we did end up having a wedding to make mostly, you know, my parents and friends and family happy In August of 2015, we got married That's actually one of our wedding pictures. We got married on my parents' back deck It was a very small wedding and I loved it But there was a lot more to that story, which I will tell on another day 2017 was the year that really everything kind of came crashing down on me when it came to my health It got to the point where I could not walk I couldn't do anything. It hurt pretty much all the time When it came to my ankle and so I had another procedure done. I saw more doctors I had another injection into my ankle, but I just couldn't live life You know, I couldn't do anything I wanted to do. I'm an active person. I love being alive I love taking my dogs for a walk in the morning But I could barely sit without being in extreme pain and in January 2018 I began realizing that I might have a decision to make in March I had my last ankle surgery kind of a last-ditch effort to fix things It honestly made things worse and the doctors told me after that that there was kind of like no hope I did a ton of research talk to a ton of specialists, but I realized that the smartest thing honestly Might be to amputate. There weren't any good options left And though that idea absolutely terrified me like don't get me wrong for a second That was horrifying to think about in theory I knew that it might be the only solution to be able to do things because after all people with prosthetic legs can Walk people with prosthetic legs can go for hikes, you know And I just wanted to be able to move I wanted to be able to be alive without being an extreme ankle pain every day So these questions really started going around my head. I talked to doctors seriously about it I talked to my family seriously about it And I had a couple months that were really rough there because I was trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do was I going to cut my leg off during this time. I started filming youtube videos I found that kind of journaling to a camera talking about the process really helped me deal with it So as I made the decision to become an amputee or not, you know, what the smartest thing would be I made videos about it and then I published them on youtube and as I went through my surgery I made videos about it and I published them on youtube as I walked into surgery to have my ankle cutoff Which was the weirdest experience I could ever try to explain to anybody I made a video about it and I honestly do believe it was the best decision that I could have made given the Circumstances, it's not one that's been simple or easy But after having it done I woke up and I didn't have any regrets That was one thing I was really scared of that when I woke up from that surgery that I'd be overcome with regret And I can honestly say that I do not regret this decision as difficult as it has been If there is one thing that I've learned during this whole journey anything that I've gone through any trauma I've experienced be that physical or mental or emotional It is that mental health is the most important thing you can possibly invest in for yourself For some people like me that meant going to counseling along with a variety of other things But whatever it means for you do it make sure that you're taking care of yourself and your mind Thanks for listening guys. That is a brief picture of my life. I am now 28 I've gone through a couple things as joey kidney said in his draw my life video. My story is not the happiest It's not the saddest, but it's my story. I love you guys I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys