 Hello, my beautiful internet friends! You may be wondering, Joe, didn't you just have surgery? And why are you looking so rambunctious and not post-surgical? It's because I record this video before surgery. I wanted to have a couple videos ready to go out to you guys in case I didn't have, you know, time, energy, or brain power to make them. And this was a question I'd gotten a surprising amount of times in the past couple weeks. Why don't I wear a prosthetic leg? Now, if you have followed my channel for a while, you'll know the answer to this, but I wanted to give a broader answer that might apply to kind of people everywhere and amputees in different situations. So me personally, I am a below-the-knee amputee, which means that below the knee, I am missing my leg. I've been on crutches since January, and it is now March, which means I have been low-key losing my mind, but building my upper body strength, so there's a silver lining to every club. Because long story short, I developed issues in my residual limb, so I could not wear a prosthetic leg because it was way too painful. Now, fingers crossed that four to six weeks after this surgery, I will get recasted for a prosthetic because I do have a prosthetic leg. It's just sitting in a closet collecting dust right now because I cannot wear it. Hopefully at that point I'll get recasted, refitted, and start that prosthesis process. I think I said that wrong. But I wanted to also talk about reasons why people might not wear prosthetics. For instance, my friend Christy Sita, who has an awesome YouTube channel, please go check it out. I've linked it down below, is an amputee about right here, and she has a prosthetic arm. She does not wear it. She doesn't wear it because she feels it looks weird. She doesn't feel like it's a part of her. It's not very useful. It's not very effective. And also, it's longer than her other arm because of how it has to fit. So it's not something that she connects well with. She uses it in the gym, and that's about it. I'll link the video that she specifically talks about this with, again, down below. Another really big reason why an amputee might not have a prosthetic arm, leg, whatever, is because they are insanely expensive. I am so grateful that I have insurance that helps to pay for all of this. But if I didn't have insurance, a prosthetic leg for a below-the-knee amputee, which doesn't require computerization, is about 20 grand. That's like for an entry-level model, essentially. That also doesn't include all the appointments, all the fittings that are usually once a week for months and months and months. And then you have to have another socket, you know, a couple months down the road from there, which is another 10 grand. Now let's talk about above-knee amputees. So if you're missing your knee joint, that gets a lot more complicated and prosthetics go over a hundred thousand dollars. That's a lot of money. I don't have that kind of money. I don't have twenty thousand dollars anywhere lying around or anything close to that. So without insurance, there is no hope of me having a prosthetic leg. So depending on someone's financial situation, depending on what someone has for insurance, it might be way too expensive for them. They might be saving up for them. Another reason why someone might not have a prosthesis is they may not like it. It may not fit well. It may hurt. They may be in the process of getting it fit correctly. There are a lot of different reasons why. Now, I received a message not long ago from someone who was considering going through this process of amputation, but said they can't imagine being on crutches for months at a time. And would never ever want that. And first off, that is definitely a possibility. And second of all, you will be on some kind of crutches or an eye walk or something like that for the rest of your life. If you have any kind of leg amputation because, and this was something that kind of freaked me out when I was considering this process. This was actually the scariest thing for me. You're not wearing your prosthetic leg all the time. You get home and generally speaking, you take it off. It's not super comfortable to wear all the time. I mean, you get more used to it, but still come home and you take it off. You get up in the morning and you don't have a leg on, so you're either hopping around, which can cause stress fractures in your foot and other fractures in your foot. And I'm pretty sure my foot is getting a little banged up from the hopping that I've been doing. Or you're walking around in crutches or you're scooting around on your butt around the floor, which I've also done too. Or you're using some other kind of mobility advice or you're in a wheelchair. Those are very real considerations for the rest of your life. Once you get a prosthetic leg, it's not like it's screwed onto your body and you wear it for the rest of your life. Hooray! It is a constant process of readjusting it, re-tweaking it. For the first year about, you go see your new prosthetics guy about every week, about every two weeks to get things readjusted because your limb is constantly changing size. That is specific to leg amputees. I'm not sure about arm, elbow, shoulder, any other kind of amputees. I'm just talking about my own experience with that. Prosthetic limbs are amazing, but they're not easy. When I first got my leg and took my first steps, I think everyone expected me to break down like crying with tears because it was like this really cool moment, right? And don't get me wrong, it was a really, really, really cool moment. But also, it's not you. It takes a while, I think, to feel like this new metal piece is a part of your body. And so I found that once I had my prosthetic leg, I mean, it hurt to wear it. I was getting used to it. I didn't want to wear it all the time because I didn't feel like it was a part of me. I, this is gonna sound weird. I wrote a letter to it kind of as a therapeutic experience and kind of talked to it like we were in an arranged marriage. Like, we're stuck with each other now. We're gonna learn to love each other. We're gonna get used to each other, but frankly, I don't know how I feel about you right now. Like, I don't have any affection for you. Again, maybe weird to write a letter to a prosthetic limb, but it was therapeutic for me to do that because I didn't feel any connection to it. It didn't feel like a part of my body, and I know that it will eventually as I get used to it. But I didn't want to wear it all the time, even for the couple weeks that I was able to. There can also be serious attachment issues depending on what kind of amputation you've had, specifically where on your body it is, what your body type is. It can be hard for them to actually attach the prosthesis to you. There are just a plethora of issues that can come up, and so not every amputee has a prosthesis, and not every amputee that has one uses it, and not every amputee that uses it uses it every day. It's a personal thing, it's a personal choice, and also it's expensive, like I said. And so it is not always within your immediate control. I feel like in public we usually only see amputees walking around with their carbon-fiber rocket foots fully adjusted, and so even that's kind of like, oh, interesting, weird to see, you know? But it's way less common to see someone completely missing a limb without anything replacing it. And there is not a darn thing wrong with that, and it's important to keep in mind that there are a lot of different reasons for that. Again, they can be personal, they can be financial, they can be medical. So those are just some, let me know in the comments section if you're an amputee, or you know an amputee that doesn't wear a prosthetic, and what that reason might be, because I think these are important to talk about and to know, because I have gotten a lot, like a lot of messages and questions about it in the last couple weeks. As for me, my fingers are like super, super, super, super crossed that the surgery will go well, it will fix the issues that I'm having, I will be able to get fitted for a new prosthetic, and things will go smoothly onward in four to six weeks, and I will definitely keep you guys, of course, updated on that. But I just want to take some time to kind of go through different reasons why people might not do that, or might not have one today. So I look forward to talking to you guys in the comments section. By the way, real quick, if you are interested in, like, quicker updates on how things have gone, definitely follow me on Instagram, that's where I will be posting well before I can edit any videos post-surgery. So follow me on Instagram if you're curious on how everything went. As always, I love you guys, I appreciate you guys, and I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye guys.