 Hello there, my beautiful, delightful, talented, intelligent, lovely internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. We have Cakes and Sophie as our co-hosts. They will be talking throughout the course of this video, generally when I'm trying to make an important point that seems to be their MO so far. Here on Footless Joe, I am Joe. I'm missing a whole foot. And I wanted to take you guys today through, yes, you guessed it, it's finally time. It's happening. It's here. The highly requested, hotly sought after scar tour. Scar tour? Yeah, I don't think anyone actually requested this, but I'm gonna do it anyway for two reasons. I have a lot of scars on my body. I've had a number of surgeries. I've had a number of little accidents here and there. And I have scars. And I know that a lot of people are uncomfortable with their scars, like I was for a period of time in my life. As I was growing up, there was always sort of this notion that scars were something to hide because they're imperfections on your body. Now, no one ever shamed me for scars or anything like that, but I know a lot of people who are very uncomfortable with the way that their bodies look for a variety of reasons. And so I thought I would take this opportunity to show you all of the imperfections on my body and the stories behind them. I'll be totally honest. I like scars. I like having evidence of things that I've gone through. I don't think that they're a badge of honor or courage, but I also don't think that for me personally, this is just me, that there's something to be hidden. So I wanted to show you guys the scars I have and the stories behind them. Some of them are pretty fun. Some of them are real dumb. As we dive in today, if you would do me a favor, if you felt like it, and hit that thumbs up button right over there, that like button, it helps this video get out to more people and help support this channel. And if you enjoy this content, if you want to hit that subscribe button, that would be fantastic as well. We just lost one of our co-host, Sophie, decided that she wasn't, she wasn't going to support this. She wasn't getting enough attention and frankly, that's unacceptable. So she's just going to quit. I respect her decision. Drum roll, please. Let us begin with the scar on my forehead. You may have noticed it. You may have not noticed it. It's usually only visible in like direct sunlight or good lighting, which I hopefully this is right now. Check it out right here. I acquired this scar when I was all of four years old. You see, I have an older brother by the name of Sam, who I greatly adore. But as kids, you know, he did what older brothers tend to do and chased me around the house with scary objects. And he had this frog stuffed animal and I was running away from him in glee. Like we were having a good time, but he was also being a real older brother. And I looked behind me to see how close he was and then turned just in time to smash my forehead into the side of an open door, to which my body responded by gushing blood. This had to be a very not fun day for my mom. Mom, I'm sorry about this. And I was rushed to the hospital where I got stitches and we got it all fixed up, but it will permanently be a part of my facial features. Number two, one of one of the more interesting scars in my personal opinion is the one on my wrist. As you may have guessed, this one is indeed a surgical scar. I did have to have wrist surgery about four years ago because I'm an artist. I was really into drawing, sketching things. And I got into this one particular type of art called Zen Tangle. I love it. I would highly recommend it to anyone to try out, even if you don't feel like you're artistic. It's awesome. It's super intricate and there's a lot of tiny little lines and a lot of little repetition. And it turns out that tiny little motions with your wrist over and over and over again for hours, not always the best thing for it. And when you compound that with also being in jiu-jitsu and rolling and people wrist locking you, apparently your wrist starts to kind of complain. So what happened is there was a tendon in there that ended up permanently inflamed. It wasn't going to go away on its own. I couldn't bend my wrist down, especially if I had my thumb like this. Like that was significant pain. So my pain management doctor referred me to a wrist surgeon and they got it done. This is one of the few surgeries that I've ever had that was just fantastically successful, no complaints, easy recovery and it fixed the problem. I no longer have any issues. I'm able to draw and write and eventually do jiu-jitsu again and it's great. Moving down to my knee. I feel like knees are very popular places for scars because if you're a kid and you run around a lot and play outside, you do fall down. Now I was raised out in Black Forest, Colorado. We had five acres, which was absolutely wonderful of forest and rocks. And the rocks did end up being a slight problem on this particular day. We had friends in from out of town and I was running. We were playing tag and I tripped and I fell and I slid. And when I slid, there was a rock about this size that got embedded in my knee and it really ripped it open. I mean pretty badly. Like there was, I'm not exaggerating, a visible dent in my skin where like my skin had been cut out. There was a lot of blood, fun stuff. I still remember what it felt like. It was, I think, a little traumatizing to my 12 year old brain but I didn't go to a doctor. I didn't go to a hospital or anything like that. In retrospect, I think it definitely needed stitches. It kind of healed outward almost like the scar bubbled up. I'm not sure what that's about. Little harm, no foul, everything turned out just fine. Moving on to knee number two. Oh, hi, you coming back? Have you decided to rejoin us? No, this won't work. You got it. You guys sit behind me and know you want all the attention. She really does. She says, listen guys, I'm so cute. Can you go lay down for mommy? You can lay down on mommy. All right. She's not really sure what she's doing here. Are any of us? I don't think so. Now actually moving on to knee number two. Now this is my right knee. This is the side of my body that has had all of the ankle surgeries and now amputations. And this scar in particular, I think it's pretty cool in that the reason that the scar exists is because they grafted bone from my knee onto my ankle during one of the surgeries that I had. They opened my knee up. I think they scraped some bone out. I'm not entirely sure how that works, but they used it as a bone graft to try to fix my ankle. Now unfortunately, that didn't work long term. However, I think it's absolutely incredible that they can use one part of your body to help save another part of your body. It's truly mind blowing that something like that could work, that we have a scientific and medical potential and knowledge to be able to do that. Now all of my coolest scars got cut off the darn doctors during the amputation. I had, I had a lot, a lot of large scars on my ankle, but thankfully that is gone as it was no longer wanting to be a part of my body was in too much pain. So we just took care of things and chopped it off. And now we have my residual limb. So if you don't know my story, if you just happened upon this video, this would be an interesting first video to watch from someone. But I have had my leg amputated twice. I had the initial amputation. It didn't heal right because of a fall that I had. And I had to have it redone. I had to have another couple inches of my leg taken off. Not an experience that I recommend for anyone. However, the second time it did seem to heal. I didn't have any falls, didn't have any major issues. And I ended up with two scars instead of just one. I got a two for one on that surgery. Actually, I had two surgeons on that surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon, the guy who specializes in amputations. And then I also had a plastic surgeon, strangely enough, plastic surgeons were brought in to do the TMR procedure, which was to hopefully help with phantom pain. And that was a completely different incision site. So I have the actual amputation incision that you can see. It's healing pretty well. And then underneath, I have the incision that was done for the nerve work that they did with the TMR. If you don't know what that is, it's called target and muscle renovation. It's basically where they bury your nerves in muscles and give them something to fire into. So hopefully some of the phantom pain goes away. In my case, that wasn't super successful, but at least they gave it a shot, right? Now I also have another scar right here. You can see it. This is a scar that I'm not super jazzed about, like I don't mind it being on my body, but it was a draining tube for my leg when I was in the hospital for the second amputation. The reason that it frustrates me to see this sometimes to a very small extent is this is also where they ripped the drain out of my leg with no anesthetic and no pain medication. That was super fun. I told that story in my second amputation video, like when I was in the hospital going through all that, but I was told that it would be painful. And so when they scheduled the time for the doctors to come in and do it, I was told I needed to have pain medication beforehand so it wouldn't be so uncomfortable. And the doctors got there and decided that there wasn't time for the nurses to do anything because they were on a schedule, so they just ripped it out. And let me tell you, that did not feel fantastic. And it left a scar. I don't think it's the doctor's fault that it left a scar. I think it's the fact that it was in my leg. But we might as well blame it on them. I mean, why not, right? This scar on my side serves as a warning to us all. Do not pick up cats that do not want to be held. This scar came from our little guy, Lewis. Lewis passed away a couple weeks ago. It's not something I talked about on this channel because they don't have words for it just yet. He was a really, really great cat. He was also very, very feisty. I picked him up once and as I picked him up, one of my dogs was coming near him and he did not love the dogs. They were not the best of friends. So he went to Leap to get off of me and to get some traction to really, you know, get a lot of up and go in his jump. He dug his claws into my side and launched off of me. So I've got a nice lung scar that took a little while to heal. Totally messed up my tattoo. How could he, Lewis? I do also have two very faint incision marks at my hip. I'm not going to show these on camera, but this is from where they put a scope up where they put a camera up to check what was going on with my heart when I was 15 and fix it. I had a heart ablation. I used to have a heart rate that would speed up really, really, really quickly. When I was resting, my heart would sometimes jump to like 200 beats a minute, which is not great for your heart long term. So they went in through these two tiny little incisions in my legs, snaked their way up my veins or arteries. I'm not sure which one and fixed the issue by burning off an extra part that my heart had that I was born with. Thankfully, no significant issues have arisen since then, and it did seem to fix the problem. The scars are super, super faded. I even have a hard time finding them. So I'm not even going to attempt to show them on camera. This scar is one that I am actually incredibly grateful for. I've never told this story on camera. I am planning on doing so in full in the near future. I was almost killed by a car falling on me at one point in my life. Like I said, I'll go into the details at another time, but I was walking my dogs at that point. You may be thinking to yourself, how could a car fall on top of you when you're out walking your dogs? Like what situation would that happen in? My thoughts precisely, but this did happen and it scared the dogs and it didn't hit us, but it hit close to us and it terrified the dogs as well as myself. And they ripped their leashes out of my hand and I was walking them with these like hard plastic extendable leashes, right? And ripped it right out of my hands, ripped part of my hand open and ended up getting a little bit infected. Not a lot, but just a little bit easily taken care of. But whenever I see this scar, I'm reminded of the fact that I took my rings off. I took my wedding ring and my engagement ring off that day to clean them. And I went and walked the dogs. If I hadn't done that, chances are in all honesty that that leash would have caught the rings because that's exactly where I was pulling from. And I probably would have de-gloved my finger or taken a significant amount of skin off. It could have been so much worse. So whenever I see this little scar, I am really grateful that that is all it is. And it's a good reminder that sometimes not the worst thing happens. Sometimes things turn out all right. So like I said, growing up I ended up with a lot of scars from different surgeries and incisions and obviously accidents. And I learned not to see them as a bad thing. I see scars on other people and I'm just curious about the story if it's something they're willing to share. I think it's important to acknowledge of course that none of my scars are particularly obvious. Some people have really significant scarring for a variety of different reasons. But I always think that it tells a story. And this is one area where I feel like I'm really cheesy. I'm like, scars, scars prove that you survived. Scars are like battle, you know, scars that didn't work. But I really appreciate that these marks on our bodies serve as proof of what we have gone through, service proof of what has not killed us, of what has left a mark and maybe told a story, but has not taken us out and serves as a good jumping off point for some memories and some stories. I will say that I have had some difficulty with the scars on my residual limb. Mostly I just have some difficulty with my residual limb in general. I don't have a problem talking to the world about it, showing it to the internet. But in real life when I'm hanging out with people, like if I'm going to get in a hot tub or a pool or something like that and I take my leg off, I am a little concerned that people are going to be grossed out. And I don't want people to be grossed out looking at me. And that's something that I have taken some time to work through. I feel a lot more secure about it now, but I definitely still have days where I'm like, I don't know. I'm not sure about this. But I honestly think that's more of a personal insecurity and less something that someone else would feel or say, but I don't know. So thank you for joining me on Joe's 2020 Scar Tour. I did want to label this with a year because who knows what could happen the next year. Maybe I'll have more cool scars. Here's a hoping I do not have more cool scars. I'd like to not have to go through more surgeries or injuries. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys sticking around for this video. I had this idea a while ago and I finally got a chance to sit down and film it. And I like being able to do this. I like being able to tell stories with the markings on my bodies. So thank you on my bodies, plural. I just have one on my body. Thank you for hanging out with me. Thanks for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything. And instead you chose to hang out with me and listen to my weird stories and my weird scars. And I really appreciate that. A huge thank you to everyone over on Patreon for supporting this channel, for continuing to support me. I cannot thank you enough for choosing to use your hard-earned money that could go anywhere. A little bit of it every month to support what I'm doing here. I'm eternally grateful for that and don't take it for granted. Thank you. If supporting this channel financially is something that you're interested in, I will leave a link on screen and down below to Patreon. It's basically a place where you can support the creators that you care about and often get things in return. Like behind the scene videos or blooper videos or a hand signed art print from me. Things along those lines if that interests you, check it out down below. And to you watching this video, I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye, guys.