 Good morning my beautiful internet friends and welcome back. I wanted to talk today about a question that I get every once in a while here on this channel. I got it in the taboo topics section but I just I felt like talking about it on a day that wasn't a Tuesday. So let's talk about if I always wanted to amputate my leg, if I always wanted it gone. When people ask me this question I kind of wonder if they're asking me if I have the IID, body identity integrity, body integrity identity disorder. That is a mental condition, a mental illness in which someone feels like a part of their body doesn't belong to be there or that they should be disabled in some way and I actually did a whole video about that. I'll link that right up here if you want to know more about that. For starters, no I don't have that condition. I've never had that condition but I did want to talk about this idea of when did I want to amputate my leg like when that question even came up. So let's dive in and talk about that. Before we do I would really love it if you'd hit subscribe on the channel and like on this video. If you hit like it helps to get out to more people. If you hit subscribe it helps me get closer to 100,000 subscribers which is something that I think would be really cool. It's a goal of mine so if you want to help me with that that'd be amazing. So let's talk timelines and amputation. Guys from the time that I was 15 I knew that one day if I lived long enough if I had the privilege of that I would become an amputee. That was just something that I came to accept but it was always something that was like far enough in the future that if someone told you that something was gonna happen to you in 40 years like the immediacy isn't there so you I'm like I started to accept it a little bit but it was more like something to joke about like I was gonna maybe become an amputee at like 65 right that was the hopeful timeline that I was given. I think the first time I ever like realistically joked about it is when I was in college when I knew that I was gonna come home from the school that I loved because I was having more issues with my ankle had to have more procedures and stuff like that. I remember sitting on a couch joking with a friend of mine in a garage they should just cut it off because I had had years and years and years of issues right but that was a joke like I obviously wanted to keep my leg kind of human nature unless you are dealing with that specific mental illness to want to keep all of your body parts that's just human instinct that's that's survival and I definitely wanted to keep all of my body parts as long as possible and for many years how I was living was like doable um not great pain sucks but I was able to do stuff I was able to participate in sports most of the time I'd have really bad weeks like I'd have like two weeks that were just miserable and I could barely walk barely do anything and then it would like kind of resolve itself and I'd be good for another couple months and then it would like plunge back into you know terrible I might have to have surgery to fix something another injection and then I'd go back to like oh this is okay I can I can walk my dogs I can hike I can do jiu-jitsu like I'm okay yeah it hurts yeah it doesn't feel good but it was livable frustrating yes livable also yeah so there was no reason for me to realistically think about amputation until it got to the point where it didn't resolve like the two bad weeks didn't go away it just always really freaking hurt and the pain level escalated a lot so where a bad day might have been sitting at like a you know a pain scale of like one to a bad day might have been sitting at like a six to a seven now that was like a seven to a nine like really really freaking hurt to try to put any pressure on my ankle not being able to work at times because of it not being able to walk not being able to do anything that I loved to do any kind of movement exercise being outside like anything often I could walk short distances right but then I take a step and it would like erupt in pain and that was totally unpredictable and sucked and it got to a level where it was horrible almost every single day and that's when I really started thinking seriously about how wise of an idea it might be to take the leaf and that's actually not when I started thinking about removing my ankle that's usually how I tell the story because you know in essence that's how it worked but that's the point at which I was like okay we need to move on to the next step of the the process which I was always told was replacing my ankle that was not a good option I found out over the course of many months that was a bad option for me that was going to buy me a couple years if it worked and that was a really big if my ankle was already fused which means my ankle didn't exist they literally screwed my foot to my leg and they were going to have to fashion an ankle in there ankle replacements don't have super high success rates and they don't have high success rates in young people and you can't be really active with them and they fail after a few months to a few years so best case scenario I was going to have another major surgery adjust to an ankle replacement which you know takes a lot of rehab takes a lot of time and then just have it fail and still be in pain because there was a lot of scar tissue there was a lot of issues with the other joints down there because of all the pressure they've been taking because my ankle was fused the nerves were all screwed up from being cut into over and over again so pain wasn't going to be gone it might help for a couple years that is when I started thinking about amputation when I learned the reality of what an ankle replacement would be because I didn't have a ton of interest in like rolling the dice and taking a gamble on a major surgery that didn't have a great success rate that would not give me a super high quality of life even if it worked well that would only buy me a couple years best case scenario and by a couple years I mean like if everything was perfect maybe five to ten maybe which means I might get to my mid 30s before having to have an amputation and I don't know what my life would look like then but it would end an amputation either way now there could be major technological developments in a couple years sure but there's nothing lined up that anyone is aware of that I could find that my doctors know of best case scenario like maybe five years is what I was told maybe a couple more probably a couple less so why would I want to have that kind of a surgery to just buy a few years to have my leg amputated at the point at which that replacement fails just being a few years older the older you are the harder it is to adjust to things I don't know what my life is going to look like at that point I don't know what medical insurance is going to look like at that point so that's when I really started to consider you know what my ankle is dead it doesn't want to be here anymore it's a goner you know and maybe it's holding on to false hope to try to keep it alive like what we're trying to do and my surgeon agreed that amputation was a good option that either I could do either one he would totally do either surgery it was up to me and I appreciated that he gave me that choice and so after a lot of thought so many hours of thinking and conversations with people I loved eventually I came to the decision that yes I was gonna amputate my leg because it was going to end there anyways period end of story I was going to be an amputee either in my late 20s or my early to mid 30s and I could waste a few more years gambling on risky painful surgery that wouldn't get me what I wanted anyways or I could just take the leap on something terrifying in the hope that it would get me to better quality of life now as you guys know there have been a lot of hiccups and things have not gone smoothly but I don't regret it the other option was trying to save something that was dying it felt like every day I was walking towards more darkness with that option having taken the leap haven't taken the step forward it's super challenging but I know it's the right choice I still know that it's the right choice because I get to move towards light like it can get better there wasn't hope of it getting better when I still had my ankle so no I definitely did not always want to amputate my leg I really really wanted to keep it for many years but that just wasn't in the cards for me also I realized I didn't clarify that the reason why the timeline got pushed up so much from like being an amputee at 65 to like you know mid to early 30s was because I had so much pain in that ankle and things the doctors had told me in the past that weren't exactly accurate and other complicating factors so it was it was a combination of a number of things that led to realizing like oh crap that actually might be the best option and I still believe that it was even though there were many challenging days thanks guys for listening I would love to hear your comments and your thoughts on this issue thank you guys for spending a few minutes of your day here with me listening to me talk about my life that means the world to me I'm truly truly grateful a huge thank you goes out to all of my patrons over on my patreon page thank you for all you do for me and for supporting me and the awesome community that we have over there today's patron of the day is Lucy Kate Lucy thank you so much for being a patron thank you for supporting me in more ways than one I am truly grateful thank you have a lovely day wherever you are in the world I look forward to chatting with you guys in the comment section down below I love you I'm thinking about you and I hope to see you in the next video bye guys