 Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Today has been a staying at home, giving myself a face mask and cleaning the house kind of day. But this has come with an unexpected complication from little sunshine here, my prosthetic leg. I've run into this issue before and we thought we had solved it, but it will not seal to me. Like it looks like it's staying on, but it's at risk of not staying on. It's actually also causing some small problems that can become bigger problems over time. So I'm gonna try to troubleshoot with you guys right now, explain what's going on and see if we can find a solution so I can keep cleaning my house because having three dogs and two cats and four rats, it makes for fun weekends of cleaning. So you may not know this, but there are actually quite a few ways that prosthetics attach to human beings. And one way is called passive suction. That is what I currently have. This one is based on suction. So forming a good seal is really, really important. The way that that is done is by a couple different means. So this right here is the sleeve. It's what goes on the outside and it forms a seal with the liner right here. Because when I put my liner on, I roll it down. This is kind of a rubbery situation. It's pretty rubbery. This is pretty rubbery. And when I roll them up together, it forms that seal and this area down here, which performs the passive suction, is allowed to actually perform suction because it has that seal. But it's not sealing. When I walk, I hear this hissing sound, which means air is constantly escaping. And that's normal to hear for like the first, I don't know, 30 seconds of walking, generally speaking, if you have your leg on, right? But I have been trying to fix this for like an hour now and nothing is working. So I have a couple more ideas. This can be caused by a variety of different things. One is that your sleeve has a hole in it. But here's the thing. This is a brand new sleeve as in two weeks ago and they should last at a minimum for like a month or four. And I haven't been using it very heavily. I've been doing minimal activities because my leg is having the issues we've discussed before. So I've just been like wearing it to walk out of the house and get in my car and walk from my car back into wherever I have to go. So there hasn't been heavy activity that it should have a hole in it or it should be broken already. And I can't find one right now, but let's double check one more time just to make sure I'm not missing something. So sleeves like this one do eventually wear out and they usually get holes right around where your socket ends. I don't know if you can see this faint line right here, but that's where my socket ends and there's gonna be a movement there of something hard to something soft. Where is it down? It creates a hole, but that takes a long time. So oftentimes you'll get holes right through here and they can be so tiny, even if they're so tiny to let that air out. So I'm gonna take a look at my sleeve here real quick, really inspect it and see if there are any holes. And then I'm gonna tell you guys about the next possible cause for this that I'm aware of. Okay, so I just roll it off to get it off. I pull my leg off, make sure it doesn't go crashing to the ground. I'm going to take a close look all through here to make sure that there aren't any openings. This seems like a perfectly good sleeve and that would make sense because it's so new, but it's possible that I'm missing one. It's a little bit hard to detect holes because it's all dark and a semi-consistent pattern and you really have to like pull it apart a little bit to see where something might be opening up. But so far so good. So let's move on to possible solution two. So something else that could potentially be happening is that my nub in here, my residual limb is not fully fitting within my socket. So for instance, all that air you hear hissing out, that's basically my leg forcing it out so that the section can form. So if my leg is not completely at the bottom of this socket, if it's not fully in there, if there's extra swelling that day or I'm wearing too many leg socks as in layers of padding, there is the possibility that it could also cause that because there's gonna be a little bit of space left in the bottom of my socket. So I've fully taken sunshine off, I've fully put her back on, I am confident that my leg is where it should be and let's try walking a little bit and see if we can get the suction to actually suction. Seems to have ceased. If I solve the problem in the process of making this video, I'm gonna be very proud of myself. So what we wanna see happening as I'm walking is that this line right here where my socket ends becomes a lot more clear. Like you can very clearly see that the sleeve is kind of suctioned onto it and it kind of looks like it is right now to be honest. So one other way of testing to see if the suction is really forming is to release the air. I have this little button on the side of my leg that I can push if I'm sitting down, I want less pressure inside my leg. Fingers crossed, we hear some air going out and a significant amount and that'll let me know that it is actually sealing again. Really hear anything come out. Let's try it one more time. I walked around a little bit more and we're gonna see if we can get it to release. There we go, okay, I think I actually fixed it. So I've tested it out a little bit further and it seems like that was actually the issue. So what was happening I think is that I put on one of these too early in the day. I thought I needed it but these go in between my liner and my sleeve might provide extra padding. As you're going about your day as a below the knee amputee your leg actually changes size and shape. As swelling goes up and swelling goes down and water retention changes and there's a variety of different factors but you could start the day needing no socks and end it needing five layers of socks. I know some people who have to wear a lot more layers. That can't be super comfortable. That can't be super comfortable and I'm glad that I only usually have to wear one or two at most but I put it on a couple hours ago thinking that I needed it and because I didn't I was trying too hard to get my leg into my socket and the layer that I added made my leg too big to actually fit. So I thought that I was getting it further in my socket but it wasn't actually. So the problem is solved but I wanna talk for a second about one of the reasons why it's so vital that you actually have a good seal on your prosthetic leg. This is a problem I've actually dealt with before. If your leg is not sealing fully if it's not attaching to you the perfect way that it should your leg can end up pistoning and I recently learned what this is. It's basically when my leg is in my socket say this is my leg and this is the socket and when I'm walking it's very slowly moving up and down just enough that it causes irritation it can cause problems long term and when my leg wasn't fully sealing which was a problem a couple weeks ago because there was a hole in my sleeve here not only do you sound weird because every step you take there's like a hissing sound coming out of your foot but secondly you can actually cause irritation to your skin and to the bone. Now this problem has been solved for a couple weeks this is the first time it's not suctioned to me properly in a little while but if that hadn't worked here's the next thing that I was gonna do. I actually just got this in the mail the other day. The next step was gonna be to replace my sleeve itself and that might not seem like a big deal but here's the thing you have to stretch this over a hard carbon fiber or in my case the salt socket and it's just a little bit challenging. So with most insurance companies with most plans you can only get replacement parts for your leg every six months. If I ran out of socks and I needed more I'd have to pay for the metal pocket. If I went through two sleeves or an extra liner before that six months was up I would need to figure it out on my own you just kind of have to deal with it. Same goes for pieces like the foot shell there are restrictions on how often you can actually get new parts for it and this is gonna vary for everybody because some people go through liners like nobody's business like a friend of mine up at the prosthetics office said that in his first year of being amputee he went through one like every month and these are like 900 to $1,100 if you pay for them out of pocket. Ouch, not a lot of people have that. Thankfully these came just in time for me. As a side note, you may not know this, I didn't but if you need new parts for your leg your prosthetist can write up instructions but it's actually a doctor who has to order them they have to have a prescription written for them for it to go through insurance. Prosthetists and their offices cannot do that. So to get more parts I need to go up to my prosthetist in Denver let them know what's going on let them know what I need he's gonna send a message down to my doctor's office in Colorado Springs I'm gonna go see that doctor and say hey I need these parts and pieces you have the message from them and he's gonna sign off on it it's gonna go back up to Denver they're gonna ship out the parts to me and then all will be good. It's a little bit of a process but it's only once every six months so it's really okay. All of this continues to be a learning experience and it involves a lot of troubleshooting and not just getting frustrated because something isn't working my gut reaction when my leg is hissing air again I'm just like what the heck are you serious like did I eat through another sleeve did I eat through another liner what am I gonna do but today I tried to just kind of take a step back and be like hmm this is a mystery let's figure it out together and so I'm glad that I actually have an answer thank you for listening guys I'm learning a little bit more about passive suction and sunshine here and my leg hissing air and solving it with me today I really appreciate it thank you to my patrons for making these videos possible if you're curious what Patreon is I will leave a link up on screen but thank you to everyone who is a member of the community there and to you watching this video right now thanks for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today you could actually be anywhere in the world doing anything else and you chose to spend a few minutes here with me and I really appreciate that I love you guys I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video bye guys what are you doing here Sophie? she follows me around like a puppy all day long