 Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to a very special segment on this channel. I like to call, maybe Joe's gonna go leg this week. I kinda wanna throw up even thinking about that possibility. This week marks one year since I had my amputation and oh my lord, it's been a ride and you guys have been here for all of it. Today also marks six weeks since my second amputation and so far, so good. I got a call from my prosthetist on Friday that I needed to start wearing the actual liner for the leg again. Gonna help shape my leg for the actual prosthetics process which is gonna take place on Friday. I haven't put a liner on in many months because it was so painful and we're gonna see how it goes. So I have a sunshine here. You may remember her. This part is gonna stay the same when I get my new leg. This part, I'm gonna take home with me but it's not gonna be my leg anymore. This is actually my old socket for the first leg that I had and this beautiful bag that is very badly organized is full of everything that I need to put a leg on and take care of it. Success, all right, so here's a liner. The big difference between this and what I've been wearing which you see right here, this is called a shrinker. So this is made out of, I'll show you and also check it out guys. I'd say it's healing pretty well so far but the biggest difference between this shrinker and this liner is kind of the texture of it. This is really just like a sock. Just imagine like leggings on your leg all the time. That I'm supposed to wear whenever I'm sleeping but the liner now I'm supposed to wear all the time. Now this is like sticky silicone sort of on the inside. It's really cold to put on if you are putting on for the first time in the day so this is gonna be a little bit chilly. It's also a lot more like thick and padded on the bottom so it helps protect the end of your residual limb. It's a lot tighter. It helps shape your leg and helps your leg actually stick to you. So let's give this a shot. Also I'm gonna be shocked if this one still works. According to the measurements I took of my leg this is gonna be a little bit too small but I don't wanna have to go up to Denver before the prosthetics appointment just to get another one if I don't have to so I figured I might as well get this shot. So to put these puppies on turn them inside out pro tip, if you cut a tiny tiny little bit in the top it'll show you where to put it on cause you want it bending the same way every time like you want your knee in the same place these don't feel terrible. So then you don't want any air between like the leg and liner so you put it right up against your skin. This doesn't feel horrible. Ow. It's past the worst part. That actually doesn't feel bad. Like at all or tight. Like that definitely puts more pressure on areas that are not super comfortable but it doesn't. It's not like pain, pain. I almost feel like crying. That's really relieving because I couldn't even wear a liner comfortably before my last surgery and this is positive progress. Like this is positive news. And also my leg is a heck of a lot smaller than it was after my first amputation which is really cool because that means I'm not gonna have to get refitted for a leg as many times, hopefully. I feel like the last couple of weeks I have gone just completely numb if I'm totally honest with you, which I like to try to do. The video I released yesterday, Dear October, is about my feelings about this month. It's a hard month for me and has a lot of trauma, memories associated with it, a lot of trauma anniversaries. It's just challenging and on top of that there's the uncertainty of if surgery worked or not and recovering from surgery and all of that and I feel like I haven't been able to put anything into words lately. Like I've tried to write or talk to the camera and it just, I can't. And I haven't actually filmed anything that involved me talking for a couple weeks now. The videos you've seen are ones that I recorded before and then edited and got out. I feel like all language has been stripped from me lately. I'm really scared that this didn't work. I'm fearful to get excited for the possibility of a leg actually working and being able to walk and what that would allow me to do. But obviously from the smile on my face, like even thinking about that is freaking awesome. I think it's so easy to just assume that things will always go wrong and things have gone wrong for a long time. It's hard to break that and I'm trying to break that. I'm gonna try to go into Friday acknowledging that my mind fully wants to predict the worst but also trying to go in hopeful because this could be really good. This could actually be the answer and I could be making like walking for the first time videos and then like taking my dogs for a walk and going hiking and oh my God, so many things that I am dying desperately, desperately dying to do. You know, if nothing else and this isn't like a it was worth it statement but if nothing else, the prolonged period of waiting for a leg has absolutely increased my appreciation of it. Not that I'm saying like I won't have a difficult time adjusting to it or that I won't be a process of adjusting to wearing a prosthesis. When I first had my amputation last October and got fitted for a prosthetic, you know, six weeks after that, everything was still so new and everything was still so weird and you know, just all of it missing a leg was brand new. It's not that I didn't have an appreciation for it but I don't think I ached for it yet and I've had months of aching to be able to walk and so when it actually happens, I think that's gonna be a really cool moment when I'm able to consistently walk without pain and when I'm literally walking on sunshine, if you guys don't know, we name this like sunshine so I can be walking on sunshine and you're welcome, that song is now stuck in your head. It's always stuck in mine. So, fearfully, pessimistically, positively and with resolve, I'm gonna head up to Denver and a couple days get fitted for a leg and holy crap, this might actually work. All I need to do to actually prepare for that is put on the liner and keep wearing it and my job is pretty simple. It's all up to the prosthetists at this point. It is one heck of a big week. You know what's really funny is Friday is actually the one year anniversary of me losing my leg so I could get my leg on the same day I lost my leg which I think we can all agree would be pretty poetic and with that, I bid you adieu. I must depart to go to work but I love you. I'm thinking of you guys and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.