 Hello there, my beautiful, lovely internet friends. Welcome back to my channel and welcome to my little recovery nest. This is where I have been perched for like two and a half weeks. The amount of blankets and pillows I have amassed is absolutely delightful. I wanted to give you a surgical update. I had TMR surgery on my residual limb, but it was a pretty extensive one. I'll link the video down below that talks about why I had to have the surgery and what it was. What it ended up being was horrific and I didn't really wanna come on here and say that because I'm bored of there not being like good news, but it's what life is right now. So I just wanted to give kind of a realistic look into what the last few weeks have been like, how traumatizing our medical system can be and also just say, hey, I've missed you guys. So Mr. McNabbins here still cannot bend. It has been three and a half weeks since I've been able to bend my knee. So the reason that I can't bend this is because if I did, it would like pull the nerves out of place and it's very important that they heal into the muscles where they've been placed. Hence this situation, however, I was clear to remove it if I keep my legs straight to be able to shower and whatnot and oh my God, it feels amazing to be able to take it off, especially with all the skin issues that were going on under there. You guys know I really didn't want to have the surgery but I didn't feel like I had other viable options if I wanted to walk again or be in less pain. So I did it and I have to say this is the only surgery I have ever regretted. Don't love using that word a whole lot and it's too soon to say that because I am nowhere near being able to see if there are actual benefits that made it worth it. If it's life changing and there are, I'll be very grateful for this but this was a horrific time all around. So I went in for surgery and my understanding is that they would at least keep me overnight, you know, just in case it's a good idea, kind of at most realistically like two days because I talked to my doctor day of surgery but they want to get you home as quickly as possible. As long as pain is under control, there's no reason you have to stay there. I ended up being there six and a half days which felt like a very long time to be in the hospital because of the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life and a horrific allergic reaction and a number of medical mistakes that took days for them to figure out. When I say that, I want to roll my eyes at myself because the amount of things that have always gone wrong when it comes to me and surgery blows my mind. I don't understand why my body does what it does and also I hate sounding all like victimy but you know what? Maybe I'm feeling a little victimy as a mindset which I'll work through but the shit that isn't supposed to happen happens. Hey friends, as I was editing this video, I realized I didn't really clarify something. When I'm talking about the issues that I had in the hospital and like doctors and nurses and all of that, please understand that I know the issue actually is with the system itself. I'm going to talk about where I was like forgotten about for hours, that was not cool. Like that was an actual human mistake but aside from that everything else I'm discussing really is a systemic issue and I did receive a lot of really amazing care specifically from the nurses who worked really hard to try to take care of me and like be there for me and I'm so grateful for them but our system is broken and I felt the pain of that. So that is primarily what I'm talking about not the individuals involved. So I got out of surgery and the first day was painful but okay I was expecting that but then it was like really painful and that kept mounting and growing. It was incredibly difficult to get any kind of pain under control even like stacking IV drugs with a lot of oral meds at the very most of what my body could handle pain medication wise without like literally like having my respiratory system have problems but something felt wrong. I have had probably about 20 surgeries, grand total in my life. I'm very familiar with post-surgery pain. This did not feel right. Like I've literally had my leg chopped off twice and this was worse and I kept telling them that and specifically what it felt like was that like my leg was burning off and as I said that I imagined, okay that's probably phantom pain. They like spliced and cut and really like messed up the nerves as part of the surgery and burning is often associated with nerve pain but it was so extreme. And so I kept bringing this up. It feels like my leg has been cut off again. It feels like my entire leg is on fire. Like it feels like my skin is literally burning off but the weird thing was phantom pain is where you no longer have a body part, right? But I was feeling this pain all the way up my leg. Very important fact. Let's put a pin in that for just a moment. During surgery my doctor put in a pain pump into my leg with a drain where it's basically injecting medicine into those nerve areas at a consistent rate. It really should numb and out. You shouldn't feel a whole lot. And I was feeling a whole lot. And so my surgeon came by a couple days later to check on me and discovered that they never turned it on. Like I'm there in a lot of pain. I've seen other doctors. I've seen nurses every shift. I've talked to them about this and it was never activated. And all of these people actually like looked at it. Like yeah, you gotta check everything when you're coming in and check on the patient. They looked at it and no one knew that it wasn't activated because it has to be like to your skin because there's a certain part very simple just needs to be taped to your skin and it never was. So I was never getting that relief because they missed it but in almost a weird way that ended up. I don't wanna say this was a blessing in disguise but it did lead to a major discovery because when my surgeon came in and was like they never turned it on. Put some stuff on my skin to sanitize it, taped everything down, okay, we're good to go. And then that area of my skin that he taped down started just like blowing up. Swelling, red, bumps, rash, looked like shingles, like pussies just gross, just real gross and painful and a little bit itchy. And it was like growing by the hour and the more that I felt it, it was like on my hip here. The more I was like this is what my leg feels like is happening to it except on a way larger scale. And because I've had issues with having an allergic reaction to a different ingredient in surgery before kind of had this light bulb moment of like I think something's actually wrong. And so I was maybe not the best patient but I started kind of poking around and trying to look as far as I could underneath the bandages without disturbing anything and saw these like welts. Called my nurse and she was obviously concerned and they were like, yeah, we should absolutely take this off, take a look at what's going on but we're not gonna be able to do that at least until tomorrow because my surgeon who is very particular with his work, I don't say that in a bad way, he is a stickler for details, always likes to be hands on and do everything himself with his patients. But at this point I was in so much pain and genuinely freaked out that even though they were like, you need to wait, I wasn't willing to. And so I ended up making a lot of calls, calling his office and he was kind enough to come over within a couple hours cause his office was literally across the street. We took it off and what was underneath was horrifying. They might do a totally different video on that in particular because I don't want to show any of the imagery of that whole process in this video if you are a squeamish person and it also it's like a story in and of itself but my skin had been basically literally burning off. Medically descriptive words for the next few minutes, like skin hanging off, massive blisters and welts and it was so gross. Turns out I had a severe allergic reaction to something else that they use commonly in surgery. Them using it was not their fault but I guess these allergies can kind of develop over time and my body just wasn't having it and what happened was like awful. It was disgusting to look at and I'm not that squeamish and I was still like, that's on my skin. Oh my God. So they began taking care of that, treating that and just trying to get pain to a place where I could get home. I'm really frustrated guys so I'm gonna share some of that frustration in case you have never had the pleasure of being stuck in a hospital as a patient who is pretty powerless. So we spent days, like I said, getting off of IV meds which are very strong, fast, effective to oral meds so I could go home because I can't go home with IV meds. There was a lot of mistakes that happened in that process. I was forgotten about for five hours after they took me off IV meds and not given any kind of pain relief and I couldn't get people in. Like I kept calling and the nurses were like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll get there. I just wouldn't hear anything for hours and I couldn't get up and I got to the point where I was like screaming in pain, like hyperventilating, I couldn't breathe and I was just like left like that for a long time. My doctor ended up being the one who found me because he came by to do like rounds at the end of his day and he was obviously very frustrated by the lack of care that I had been provided. This kind of plays off of years of painful and borderline traumatic sort of experiences in the hospital, in our medical system, but when you cannot rely on people or the system to help you and you are literally held prisoner by it, that feeling of helplessness is awful and it's something I don't wanna think about and that same situation ended up repeating itself where I was not cared for and got to an unmanageable level of pain. I think the only time I've ever said that pain was a 10 out of 10 for me was when I woke up from my amputation surgery and the nerve block didn't work, so I felt everything. This was that level where I was fully awake for it. Kind of getting back to the point, we get past that and we start trying to get me home. Turns out the nerve block that hadn't been turned on, once they got it working, unfortunately it didn't work because where it was placed in my leg, it just wasn't numbing what it should have been numbing. I've had that experience a number of times, sometimes getting proper placement for these nerve blocks is difficult. So they just took it out because it was not helping. We get to the part of the story where I want to burn down our system and start over. I got to the hospital on Friday and it's like Wednesday by this point, I am ready to go home. And I finally got to a place where we had medications that were all oral that I could survive. The pain was still really bad but I'm like, it's worth it to get home. And it was like, okay, great, this is amazing. We've been trying to work on this for days. We're finally there. So then they order those medications and have them delivered to my room so I can take them home. And I take a look at it and it is less than half of the dose that I was like barely okay on of one pain medication and the other pain medication was simply not included at all. So obviously being a little bit concerned about pain management, if things are cut in half and then some, I brought this up to the nurse practitioner and the nurses. And what they told me was, yeah, you know, pharmacies just actually won't write prescriptions for that amount of medication. So, you know, it's difficult. These are the people that spent days making sure that I could be on oral medications so I could go home full well knowing that I was not going to be able to have those medications. So I am sent away from the hospital having to have everything cut. And the issue of pain medication and management in America is a very complicated one that is a different discussion for a different video, but it's just idiotic to me because as I am in a lot of pain I'm having to try to figure out how I'm gonna get this pain managed and survive. Was able to figure some stuff out and got through. One of the sweetest things ever, my good friends had me come from the hospital home with them so I wasn't gonna be alone at home. My parents were leaving for Ireland. I've always had my parents around for like major surgeries. And so my friends took care of me like I was family and so very grateful for them. And so many friends. I have just gone above and beyond to bring me food, show up, take my dog out for a walk, do literally whatever I needed. And I am so grateful because this time around, like I said, it's the first time I went through major surgery where I wasn't in my parents' household as a kid or, you know, I was married for years. So it was with my partner there. The normal things that I relied on were gone. And so facing this and realizing I literally cannot get through this without asking for help from the people who wanna help me. It has been a real exercise in allowing people to show up. It's been a crash course in recognizing I am not capable of some things. I need help and I need to ask for that help and also accept that help. And I cannot thank everyone enough. Also to all of you beautiful internet friends. Everyone has been so supportive and sweet and kind and sending messages. Thank you. During all this downtime, I decided to try to learn a new skill so I would have something to focus on. So I started learning Procreate on the iPad to do digital art. Here are some of the things that I was working on through just straight tutorials off of YouTube. It was really good to like do one of these a day and kind of feel like I was learning something new. I've done physical art my whole life but I've always been like digital art, uh, no. But it's great. It was super fun. And also I have watched eight seasons of suits. Eight seasons of suits. So many suits. I don't even know why I picked that show because I've never had any interest in it but as I was in my super drugged out haze at my best friend's house recovering, I was like, I saw it pop up on Peacock and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna watch every episode of that show in the next few weeks and I'm almost there. Also a healthy dose of Trashy Reality TV which has been rotting my brain which honestly works for me right now. So in a couple of days, it will be one month since the surgery. Then shall begin the process of slowly being able to, you know, bend my knee, get range of motion back, start building up some strength, be able to use my eye walk, crutch again weeks later, start using my prosthetic legs, see how it feels. The reality is because of the complexity of the surgery and everything that they did and working on nerves, we won't really know if it worked for like four to six months. At that point, it's kind of a guarantee that pain will be worse up until that point and hopefully we'll start easing off and the surgical pain will go away and hopefully additionally in the pain that I was dealing with which was the reason I had to have a surgery in the first place will be better, fixed, resolved. You know, just even I would be thrilled if there was even a bit of a reduction at a minimum as long as it doesn't stay worse, I will be grateful for that. I'm at the place now where I'm very slowly trying to get back to work, it's been challenging but good to like feel a sense of accomplishment of being like, you know what, at least I went through my emails today, that's enough. I've been able to get out and about a little bit, you know, see some people do some things. I went to the gym yesterday because I've been dealing with insomnia and I was like, maybe if I exhaust myself, I'll just pass out. It actually kind of did work, slept for like three hours. So it's gonna be a long road until kind of a sense of normalcy comes back but I'm glad to be this far along in recovery. Things don't always go according to plan, right? And I knew that and that was one of the reasons I was really scared to have this done and didn't want to have it done because shit happens and you can't control it, you can control how you respond to it, that's about it. This is a little bit more of a longer video than I intended it for it to be. So thank you for listening to me. I think I'm gonna end it there for now. I will be doing a video about that allergic reaction I had because as much as it was like horrifying to me, it's also really fascinating and it was like really crazy looking. So for any weirdos like me who are like fascinated by this kind of stuff, that video will be for you guys and I will put plenty of disclaimers to being like, don't watch this if you don't, like if you're squeamish at all, it's not gonna be for you but that will probably be the next video that I create and I will show you the aftermath of what my leg currently looks like a month after it happened. Thank you so much for being there. It will never cease to absolutely amaze me. But you care to listen to me. Thank you for being a part of my life and hearing my story and for all of the encouragement. I think I'm gonna end it there. Tell my patrons over on Patreon, thank you for your incredible continued support in you watching this video right now. Thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day. Here with me today, you could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else but 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. Gosh darn it. Bye guys.