 Good morning, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me this morning for some fantastic amputee related news. I feel like I should just use this permanently as a microphone. So without further ado, today in amputee news. Now, if you're not an amputee, please don't click away because this could apply to you or someone you know as well. A bunch of you guys sent me this article and I'm really grateful that you did. Thank you for sending information my way. Zappos, which is a shoe company, did something pretty cool this week. Let's talk about it. As we dive in, if you wanna give this video a thumbs up, it does help it to get out to more people. This one in particular I think would be pretty cool if as many people as possible could see it because this is really awesome news for my community and for many other communities. So give it a thumbs up or a foot up depending on what kind of appendages you may have. Subscribe if you feel like it and let's talk about this. It was recently announced as in two days ago because I am a little bit late to the story that Zappos, which is a shoe company as I mentioned will now be selling pairs of shoes as not pairs of shoes. As in you could buy a single pair if you wanted to. I keep saying pair. What I mean to say is a single shoe. You could buy just a single shoe from them and if you're a person who has an able body and has never really thought much about this, you might say, okay, that's weird and why would I ever do that? But for us amputees and for people who have feet that are different sizes because that absolutely exists, this is amazing news. One of the biggest questions I get asked is what do I do with the other shoe? And that's if someone seeks me if I'm not wearing my prosthetic leg. I think people kind of forget that some amputees do get to wear prosthesis and if you wear a prosthesis, both of your feet, whether or not they are human meat food you do need shoes to walk in places. But a lot of people wonder about this and there's never been a company that I've been aware of, especially a large company that will allow you to just buy a single pair of shoes. There are like exchange amputee exchange sites where you could find like your soul mate as in soul, not soul. If you're missing a right foot and they're missing a left foot and you guys happen to have the same shoe size you could kind of send pairs back and forth but this is so much simpler than that. Something that I'm personally really excited about is the fact that they are selling shoes in different sizes. So you could like get a size eight on your right side and a size nine on your left side. So Zappos has actually already been sort of on the cutting edge of actually being inclusive with their footwear. They have the Zappos adaptive line which has been going on for a little while which includes footwear that's a little bit easier for people to put on but I feel like this is really the next step. Literally and figuratively the needs to be taken. Though I realize it's standard and what everyone does, you know, you buy a pair of shoes, it comes in two that's how it works. People have two feet. The reality is that not everyone has two feet. Not all amputees use prosthetics meaning that some amputees really only ever need a right shoe and that's it. Some of my personal friends don't wear prosthetics either because they prefer not to or because they are unable to and having to pay for two shoes when they're only ever going to throw one out or donate one. I don't think goodwill would even take a single shoe that's useless to most people. That's just an unnecessary expense. So being able to get exactly what you need is so cool. This is something I had the luxury of not really thinking about for a long time and that's the case for many people. You go get a pair of shoes and if story you don't think about it but for many more people than I was previously aware of before I became an amputee, finding footwear and having to pay for two shoes when you only need one becomes an issue. If your feet are not the same size which is the case for many people you have to buy two pairs of shoes which is an extraordinary expense. Brands being inclusive to people with disabilities or people whose bodies are different is actually really meaningful. Like seeing this news made me really, really happy because it reminds you that people do know that you exist, that your existence is not forgotten or invisible to people and to brands and I find that to be really important. Like obviously if I wasn't able to wear a prosthetic leg I would just be buying pairs of shoes and two shoes and I probably wouldn't think twice about it because that's just the way things are but to have a company say hey, I know that's not the way things are for everybody and recognize that makes a difference. It makes you feel seen, it makes you feel heard and it's really important to feel that way. So as they launch this they're not doing with every single kind of shoe they're doing with 80 different styles and pairs so they'll be limited to selection to start with and then they'll see kind of what happens with it. If you've been following my channel for a little while you probably know this already but for the first year or so of being an ABT I could not wear a prosthetic limb at all. We tried a couple different times but I had a fall which led to surgery which led to a second amputation of sorts they had to take another inch of my leg off and so I couldn't wear a prosthetic leg meaning that all of my pressure, all my weight was coming down on one foot that entire time and I had pairs of shoes that got exponentially worn out on the left side and had absolutely no wear on the right side because obviously I didn't have a right foot I wasn't able to use it. And I got to a certain point throughout that year where I knew that this was gonna be the case for a while because I was waiting for more surgeries coming up and if I had known that I could just buy one shoe especially for a trip that I went on I probably would have done that. I wouldn't have spent the money on two pairs or on two sides, on both sides. I'm not sure of the proper terminology here. Personally I think that this is cause for celebration this is pretty awesome. I really appreciate that a major retailer is showing something so inclusive is making moves in this direction. I expect many other companies may follow. Fingers crossed, hopefully. This is launching on Tuesday so if you are interested if this is something you wanna try out check out their site Tuesday morning. It should be live. You should be able to see the 80 different pairs of shoes you can choose from or single shoes you can choose from or different sizes. Hopefully brands like Nike and I don't know other big shoe companies I can't think of any at the moment will be soon to follow. Zappos is one of the largest online retailers of footwear so they are setting the example for everyone else and I think this is really cool. I can say personally as a Bologna amputee I really appreciate that they are moving in this direction of inclusion. There are a lot of people who are gonna benefit from this so for me to use Zappos thank you so much for doing this. This is awesome news and I'm really excited to hear it. This is kind of a short and to the point video today I just wanted to make sure I got that information out to anyone who might be affected by it or know anyone affected by it. This is awesome. I think if someone likes to sign this video but I'm really excited for it. So thank you for listening. Thank you to my patrons for sponsoring these videos and making them possible. I truly appreciate each and every one of you. If you're interested in financially supporting this channel anyway, check out the link on screen or in the description down below. There are different perks that you can get for being a part of that community and I would appreciate it. To you watching this video, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today getting excited about footwear. Thrilling, I know. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes and I really appreciate that. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. I really should use this as a microphone for the rest of my videos. Would it go this way or this way? I think it would go this way. Looks like I'm trying to eat a foot then. Which I'm definitely not into. Anyways, bye guys. Have you heard from the sky?