 Good morning, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back. I wanted to share with you guys news as I finally have it about what is happening with my leg. I know actually what is going to be occurring and it's kind of a lot to handle and to digest right now. So I wanted to tell you what's happening and then also share one little tidbit that I've been mulling over the last couple of days that's kind of helped me process this information. So back on Wednesday, I went up to Denver with my lovely husband Brian and we met with my new surgeon. I've been talking with him for a little while now. I actually got consultation from him. On my last surgery and decided to go with him and his team and another surgeon who's gonna be in the surgery as well for this upcoming thing that we have going on. And I released a video a little while ago talking about how I'm going to have my leg amputee again but it was a probably and I said that in the video like this is probably what's gonna be happening. It wasn't for sure. I was still waiting on some other test results. He wanted to have other scans to make sure that he knew exactly what was going on. And so Wednesday we went up there to check in and actually determine a course of action. I've been sitting in limbo for a really long time. I've been sitting in limbo really since frankly like December but specifically since the end of April not really knowing what's happening or what's going on. And when I heard that we might have a course of direction like I don't know about a month ago when I had that last appointment with him it was exciting to know that okay, well maybe something can actually be done but because there wasn't a specific course of action I don't think the reality of anything hit me because I didn't have a specific thing to picture. Like oh this is what we're doing and this is when we're doing it. I now have that and it's a lot to digest. It's a lot to handle and to take in. So what we are going to be doing is on August 27th which ironically is our wedding anniversary so we're still kind of trying to decide if that's the day I wanna have this done or not. Let me know your opinions in the comments down below but I am going to have my leg re-amputated. I get to keep my knee which is super frickin' awesome but what they're gonna do is shorten it a little bit they're gonna remove the urtil. I realize that's probably gonna be controversial. If you have no idea what I just said, don't worry about it. It's not that important. Basically what an urtil is, it's like a bone bridge so you have your two leg bones, right? What I have had previously is they took a piece of the leg that they chopped off and they stuck it right there and it was supposed to fuse. The best way to describe it is like this is a lot more stable when you kind of have that triangle than just like two chopsticks. The problem is it didn't actually fully heal, it didn't fuse and so there's been one side of my leg that has not actually been right. It's not been connected. So when I've said it hasn't felt right, like something has felt wrong, I've been correct I guess. Along with the fact that the bone grew on the other side, grew spurs and the muscle went away from that part of it so it's like bone skin sticking out and then the urtil never actually healed so the bone didn't properly fuse and I have nerve pain on top of it and the skin's all weird. So anyways, long story short, that's what they're gonna be doing. They're going to be shortening it, they're going to be fixing the skin issues, they're gonna be doing a target muscle renovation which is a cool procedure that is supposed to help. Fingers crossed with phantom pain and they're going to be moving my muscle back around to hopefully cover more of the bone and they're gonna leave me with a chopstick version of the leg. This freaks me out because it could mean that I never get to do jiu-jitsu again. Now that's not a hard and fast thing but my surgeon did mention that it would be something that I might want to just try and see how it goes but he didn't really have high hopes for it working. If you know someone who does jiu-jitsu and they have a below the knee amputation that is not an hurdle, let me know. Jiu-jitsu was kind of previously my life and at this point, priority one is being able to walk, is being able to find a new normal that involves getting around on my own that involves being able to do more than I'm doing right now but the reason I did this is so that I could do more than I was previously doing with a leg that just didn't work, right, that hurt all the time and I haven't gotten that result. I've gotten the opposite of that result. I've been severely more restricted. Now with that being said, here's the hoping that I'll still be able to do jiu-jitsu. Frankly, I have no idea, so we'll just wait and see and right now I'm just gonna worry about getting through the surgery and getting up and walking and what really hit me when he told me that and when we actually put on the schedule is I've been through this once. I've had my leg cut off once before and it is gonna kind of be like starting back over. Like it'll be days in the hospital, it'll be four weeks, I believe, in a cast which is two weeks longer than last time which, oh man, I was like losing it at two weeks in a cast with like the itching and just discomfort and everything so pray to the Lord above for me when it comes to that. Having gone through this once, the short story is I don't wanna go through it again. This is a lot for me to deal with. This is a lot for me to process and frankly, I'm having a hard time. I have good moments and I have bad moments but one thing that just hit me when I was driving the other day was the lines on the freeway. What are you talking about, Joe? Well, let me explain. When I was learning to drive, my dad actually taught me a 16, was driving our big silver Nissan truck. When you're a kid learning to drive, I think it's your instinct to look down at the road directly in front of you, right? Cause you don't wanna hit anything and so you're like clutching onto the wheel, you're freaked out, you don't wanna kill anyone or yourself driving that car and you're like looking straight at the road right in front of you and you're like, you know, swerving and freaked out cause everything's right there and it's coming at you and my dad was like, look up, Jordan, cause my family calls me Jordan cause that's my actual name. Jordan, look up, look further down the road. Like don't look at what's right in front of you. Don't look at the stripes along the road right next to you. Look further up. When you look further away, things become more clear and you can navigate better and wow, that's true. I actually tried it cause that memory came back and I was driving on the freeway and I was like, I wonder what happened? So I looked like right in front of my car and you lose all perspective. You can't see what's going on around you when you're looking right in front of you and you can't see what's coming down the road. You have no perspective on anything but when you look up and you look further down the road you can see, you can still see what's in front of you but you also have a glimpse of the future of where your car's going and what's going on around you and the anxiety goes way down cause you're not worried about just swerving to miss the rock right in your path. You can see more of what's to come and this has just been sort of echoing in my head as I've been trying to process these emotions around starting over, around the last 10 months kind of being for nothing. Even though they aren't for nothing. We can talk about that more later but just really having to restart this whole process. If I'm looking right in front of me, if I'm just looking at, oh my God I'm going to have to go through this horrible surgery all over again and it sucks and I want to do anything but that and it's horrible. It's really extraordinarily painful and it's awful to be in that position and to be that restricted and to deal with all of the things that come along with that, not just the physical pain and I'm going to be like at step one again and like I'm thinking about all the stuff that's like right here that is right in front of me. I'm thinking like two, three, four months ahead and I'm completely overwhelmed and paralyzed and I just want to curl up and never move or think or breathe ever again. But if I look up, if I look a little bit further out I think a year down the road or two years down the road I know that this is absolutely the right thing to do. I know that this will suck but it will be a memory that I process and I move through. It'll be something that is simply a step along the way to a better life, hopefully. It will help me walk. It'll be a crappy thing to go through but in the grand scheme of things, it's a small thing. It's just swerving to hit a rock that's in my path right now, right? It's not the entire road that I'm on. I don't know if that analogy was a stretch or not but it's been helping me. We have a tendency to look at what's immediately in front of us and it causes so much anxiety and worry, at least it does for me. If I'm thinking about what's right in front of me I just start to lose it. But if I let myself look a little further out, look at six months to a year or whatever. I realize that the thing that I am freaking out about it matters, it absolutely matters but it doesn't quite hold the gravity in that timeframe that it does in this timeframe and so it helps to give me a little bit of perspective and I thought maybe it would help give you guys a little bit of perspective too. So I'm going to, you know what, hop back into work and then spend some time just trying to relax later because there's a lot going on in my head and my mind and my body right now. Probably curl up with this adorable puppy right here. Look at that thing. Look at her. Brian took her for a long walk this morning and tuckered her out which is really an accomplishment and she kind of goes and goes and goes and goes. So I'm going to leave you guys with that but I love you, I'm thinking of you. I so appreciate the time that you spent here with me and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys. 🎵 Hand her from the sky all about... 🎵