 Well, good morning my beautiful friends and welcome to a very special edition of Taboo Topics. So I asked you guys on my community tab what questions you wouldn't normally feel super comfortable asking someone like if you had a friend who was an amputee or if you just ran into someone who was an amputee. Side note, I wouldn't normally suggest asking random questions to random amputees but with that being said, I'm pretty difficult to offend. I'm an open book and I ask for any questions as long as they were respectfully asked. I was open to them and so you guys really delivered. You asked a lot of really interesting questions and I'm super excited to cover a lot of them in upcoming videos and if I could give like percentages to all of the questions that were asked, about 40% of them all dealt with phantom pain and so I thought it was only right that the first video I did addressed phantom pain kind of in-depth and I guess it makes sense a lot of the questions would be about phantom pain because it's not something that non-amputees experience so let me tell you a little bit about my experience with that. Also, these shirts finally came in. Ta-da! So I drew this elephant a couple years ago and I put it on a shirt with a saying for you guys and you were super super supportive. I am so appreciative to everyone who ordered it. Link is in the bio, it's gonna be available for a little while longer. Check out the links below to grab yours today. So by far, phantom pain was my biggest concern leading up to surgery. It's kind of a wild card in amputation in a number of ways. First of all, you don't know what it feels like before you've been there. Like there's no way for a normal person, I mean I'm an oral person but like a non-amputee to know what it really feels like to experience that and you don't know how severe it's going to be and how often you're going to experience it and some people have it horrible. Some people have it all the time. It's like non-relenting and one of the big issues is that normal pain medication doesn't treat it like you can't take morphine, doesn't touch it, oxy doesn't touch it. So why is that? Is it because phantom pain is all in your head and people are just making it up? I've definitely heard some people say that like the word phantom makes you think of something that isn't really there that's kind of ethereal doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I think phantom pain is sort of misleading because it's still actual pain. It's still very very real pain. It's just your nerves misfiring essentially. The sad thing is is that doctors used to believe a while ago that phantom pain was a psychological condition that it was like all in your head and patients were essentially making it up but that was never the case. It never has been the case. So these sensations and pain originate in your spinal cord and your brain. One of the best ways that I've heard it described is that when you're born your brain essentially has a map of your body parts of where they're supposed to be and it sends signals there and when you remove a body part that brain map still exists and so your brain is constantly sending signals out to it but it's not there anymore and so it's like the signals are fried essentially. Now that's not a scientific definition. Sorry I just heard really weird noise in my house and no one else is here. If you see this video hopefully I lived. Now that definition is definitely not a scientific one but it kind of gives a good example of what it's like. Your body still thinks your leg is there and so the moment that I woke up from surgery literally the second that I woke up that my leg had been chopped off I felt my toes. I felt my foot and it felt like it was on fire and the creepy part is that it actually was. They incinerate body parts after surgery depending on the situation and so while they were burning my leg my leg felt like it was on fire. Weird situations moving on. I have felt my foot 24 seven ever since it was chopped off. It has felt like it is there. I am moving my toes right now. I feel like there is sensation going to it. It's still there but when I look it's gone and that can be really difficult because I'll do things like you know when you're laying in bed and you know one foot itches and so you'll reach over and try to like itch it with your other foot. I can't do that anymore and so there have been many times when I've like tried to itch one foot with the other foot and been like oh crap well can't do that anymore because I don't have a foot but I've actually like moved my leg to try to do it and then realized it's not there anymore. Now sitting here right now it doesn't hurt. Sitting here right now my foot doesn't feel like someone stabbing it or like it's on fire but for the first seven weeks after surgery what fan of pain feels like it feels like a lot of normal sensations that people can experience. What I actually felt the most after surgery was like an electrical cattle prod was stuck to the end of my foot and there were days on end days where I basically didn't sleep unless I was heavily heavily medicated because it felt like someone was like there was a constant current of electricity hooked up to the bottom of my non-existent foot that was constantly shocking me and just going through and it was like awful and I would jump like actually jump and like cry out and it was a weird experience for all of us. A lot of amputees experience burning because that's a very nerve related sensation and it's nerve pain it's a nervous she because those nerves have been cut in half severed but what I felt was electricity for like seven weeks and it sucked for the first four days after surgery I was like cool all right this is just like normal chopping leg off kind of pain and then it really set in and especially after I got my cast off after two weeks after that pressure was removed it was really really bad and I was afraid that it wasn't going to go away because it was like seven weeks that's a long time right and everyone kept telling me that like it'll get better like this is just after surgery your body's trying to adjust and so you kind of just have to trust that because for most people it does get better it does go away and you have to do some things for instance mirror therapy I started doing mirror therapy as soon as I could I'll put a link down below and up above to a mirror therapy video that I did that essentially describes what it is but you're pretty much trying to trick your brain into thinking that your foot or your leg or whatever body part is still there and trying to move it and making your brain think hey it's still there like don't worry about it and it kind of calms down that sensation for a little while and I can take a while to set in I was really consistent with mirror therapy every day for two months and it took seven weeks for my fan of pain to go away now I don't know if it went away because of mirror therapy but I know that I definitely was consistent with that and on top of that I was also taking a nerve pain medication called gabapentin gabapentin and Lyrica are kind of the two drugs that amputees generally take for nerve pain is one or the other I started taking gabapentin a few days before surgery because it's kind of supposed to build up in your system a lot of people have strong opinions against or for gabapentin I'm not here to debate that today maybe I will in another day I came off that drug as soon as I could as soon as the nerve pain died down but it seemed to help a little bit anyways but those are two major strategies that people use to try to control fan and pain now it's not all the way gone after those seven weeks it died down to the point where like I was not in agony most hours of the day but I'll still get shots of it throughout the day I'll still get like an electrical current for like 30 seconds and then I'll be fine probably kind of funny if you're around me and you see it because I kind of just like jump and like grab my leg real quick or I'll feel like a pinching or like a cramping when I tried out and picked up my prosthetic leg a couple days ago when I actually tried it on it felt like my entire calf all the way down to my ankle in my foot was cramping like very very real sensation and a hundred percent feels like it's still there the only difference is that it feels sometimes like it's frozen like imagine if you were trying to move your foot but it was stuck in cement like you could try to move it like you're trying to move your toes they just won't quite do it that's kind of what it feels like so it's like it's there but you can't do anything with it it's just a very odd experience it's something that you kind of have to feel yourself but it's nothing that you yourself haven't felt it's not like it's a totally new sensation it's sensations that I've always been familiar with that are kind of like perverted and morphed and um when they're pain it's almost like they're used against you but phantom sensation is kind of always there it's like I always feel my foot it's just my ghost foot it just doesn't want to leave the earth just yet I feel really lucky that phantom pain is uh essentially under control for me it can come back at any time like it can get worse I know that exercise and stretching definitely helped me as well and so I try to kind of keep current with that as well but it was something that really concerned me and that definitely is a big concern because it's a big risk for any amputees and pretty much every amputee ever has experienced it to some extent I think I've never talked to any who haven't but maybe they're out there so that's a little bit about phantom pain if you have any questions I would love to hear them or just comments about it pop them down in the comment section I'll talk to you guys down there also like I said that post is up in the community section asking for any like taboo questions I'm definitely going to be covering a number in upcoming videos but if you guys would like to add on to that thread it is still open I'm still accepting suggestions for videos suggestions for questions I cover so pop on over there and leave your suggestion or your question there and I will hopefully have a chance to cover it in an upcoming video love you guys I'm thinking of you and I will talk to you guys in the next video bye guys