 Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I am so excited to finally be back with you guys. I have been sick and out of it and gone for weeks and not able to talk with you. And I really missed it. So thank you for being back with me here today. I'm finally starting to feel human again, still a little bit sick, but doing much better. So with that being said, I'm going to talk about something that I wasn't planning on talking about. I wanted to talk about kind of deeper things and some stuff that's been going on. And I realized I emotionally, frankly, don't have the capacity for it today. So we'll save that for a later date. But I did want to talk with you about a question that I'd received a few weeks ago. I realized I've never made a video about this. And it's kind of shocking to me because this seems like a question people would want to know. I wanted to know this before I had my leg amputation. And that's the question of how, how painful is it really how painful on a scale of one to 10? Is it to like have a have a arm or a leg chopped off? Now I have obviously only had the experience of this puppy being gone, but it's a very valid question. And the person in the comments section asked me like on a scale of one to 10, no BS, how much does it hurt? I wrote them like a three paragraph response because I was like, I can't just answer this with a single number because it changes over time. It shifts and it's kind of like a moving target, especially for those first few months. Now I do realize that this is not going to apply to most people watching my channel, hopefully ever. I hope you never have to face losing limb. But on the off chance, you might as well stick around and learn some information. This was something I was obviously really concerned and curious about heading into my amputation. Like I could ask my doctor how much does it hurt to lose a leg? But that seems kind of like a redundant question because it's going to hurt. Something is being removed from your body that generally speaking is supposed to be there. And it's not going to feel good. But what does it actually mean? Because I've gone through surgeries before. So is it going to be like twice as bad as any surgery I've ever had? And how long is that going to last? And I will clarify that this is only my experience. Everyone feels pain differently. Everyone has different biological pain tolerances and everyone's surgeries go differently or amputation. So don't take this as gospel. This is really just my experience. As I was preparing for my amputation, because if you don't know, I had a few weeks to know that this is what was going to be happening. This is a decision that I made. This is what we're going through with. So I spent a lot of time researching everything I could possibly think of about the process. And something that there wasn't a whole lot of information about is the pain of it. Because it's, well, I mean, it's variable. It's different for different people, but it also seemed like there wasn't a lot of consistent good information out there. So I'm going to tell this story chronologically, except for one thing. I'm going to be talking obviously a lot about hurt and pain in this video. I need you to know that it does have somewhat of a happy ending because talking about how much things hurt is maybe not the rosiest subject to be addressing, but I do think it's important. So I went in for a surgery on October 11th, 2018, got wheeled back into surgery. They sawed my leg off, which is still bizarre to think about, and I woke up. Now at this point, generally speaking, people are not going to be feeling a whole lot. They either give you an epidural or nerve block before an amputation in most cases, and that should help with the initial pain. And then they got drugs in your system, so you should be pretty toped up and okay, right? I was an anomaly in that that did not work. They missed the nerve block, so I woke up feeling absolutely everything, which was one of the least enjoyable experiences of my life. It was on a scale of one to 10, I would give it a nine just because I'm sure there are more painful things a body could go through. But it was pretty bad. But that took a couple hours for them to get under control. And at that point, I'd say that's kind of when the normal began. So pain in the hospital minus that initial waking up moment was not good, but I would put it in the realm of bearable thanks to good medications. They did have some problems controlling it, like it kept on sneaking up to like a seven or an eight on the pain scale, which was too much. So they tried different varieties of medications and eventually they put me on a at home nerve block. They basically inserted these things into my leg that would slowly be releasing nerve block medication, I guess for a week and a half. And that really helped because it numbed that entire area as it had time to heal. When I've talked to other friends about their experiences post amputation surgery, specifically below knee, because I most of the people I know are below knee amputees, their experiences that the first few days are hard. But generally pain can be kept under control, especially if you're working with good doctors who know how to properly administer pain medication. So I made it back home. And from the time I made it back home to the time that I got my cast off two weeks later, I feel like things were pretty stable. I was in pain every day. I was staying consistent with my pain medication. But I'd give it like a, like most days were like a five to a seven, like it hurt, but I could function, I could sleep, I was doped up. So it's all right, right. And I was warned that when my cast came off, things might get a little bit worse, because we'd be releasing any pressure in there and disturbing it and all of that. And they were entirely accurate. Not everyone has a cast after their amputation. In fact, I think it's somewhat less common, but I did. That's how they felt I would heal best. So I went back in, had the cast taken off, came back home. And that's when the most uncomfortable five weeks of my life started. Phantom pain. Phantom pain came paying me a visit. And it is a weird thing to experience. I felt consistently like there was a cattle prod being like shoved up against the bottom of my non-existent heel and constant, like painful electricity. I don't know if that makes sense. And I would just sit on the couch and be in tears because there's nothing I could do to get it to calm down. One of the problems with Phantom pain is that it's nerve pain. And a lot of normal kinds of medications don't really help with nerve pain. There are two, Gabapentin and Lyrica. I was on both of them at different times and they didn't seem to do a whole lot for me. But Phantom pain can be really scary and really hard to treat because it's your body doing what your body does when it's lost a body part. It's not an easy thing to work through. And it was scary because there's no guarantee that it's going to go away or even reduce in severity. Some people have horrible crippling Phantom pain their entire lives. Most people, it gets better for some people. It doesn't exist at all, which I'm super glad for them. But from week two to seven, so those five weeks, I was in a lot of pain. I don't want to say all the time because there were some moments where I was okay. But when it hit, it would be like a seven or an eight consistently for like hours on end without really letting up, which was hard to deal with. Especially after a couple of days, I started feeling like I was losing my mind. And I reached out to other amputees to be like, dude, is this normal? I don't know how to do this. Like, is it ever going to go away? And no one can have that answer. But I did start doing mirror therapy, which was very, very helpful. I have another video on that, which I will link in this video. But it helps with Phantom pain for a lot of people. I stayed consistent with it for a month. And it did eventually subside. After those first seven weeks of amputation, I was at a place where I could get fitted for a prosthesis and start that whole process. And it was really funny to me when I learned that people get fitted for prosthesis for prosthetics. I should really know that word. Like eight weeks after losing limbs, because in my mind, I was thinking, like, doesn't it take a body a lot longer to heal from something so significant? And the answer is kind of, I mean, your body is still healing. You're still adjusting. It's still really swollen. But you can actually start putting pressure on it for most people again. So at that point, pain was manageable. I was still in medications, but not nearly as much of them. I was able to get out and about and do some things and start trying to participate in life. And any of the pain that I was experiencing on a daily level was anywhere from like an aching consistent four to like, you know, a six on a really bad day and then spiking up with Phantom pain, which would still come in zaps. It's just the Phantom pain didn't last all the time, which was the big difference. I will say that that has thankfully stayed the case. I still have Phantom pain. It's still not great. But when it hits, it's usually no longer than a few seconds of really painful sensation, but I know it's going to release. And so it's a lot easier to deal with when you know, okay, this feels like hell, this feels like someone is literally slicing into the side of my foot that doesn't exist anymore. But I know it's going to release in like five or six seconds. So that part still existed then and exists now, but is not something that I have a particularly difficult time dealing with just because the duration is not prolonged. So I got fitted for my prosthetic leg and this is where again, things are maybe a little bit different for me than other people, but many people do have falls. I had a bad fall in a restaurant fell directly on the bottom of my leg because the floors were greasy and things got set back pretty significantly. I was no longer able to use my leg. I tried for a little while, but I was like, this does not feel right. And over the next few months, a bursa grew and there were some other issues going on because of everything that had happened. And so for that like in between time after I fell on it, I'd say my leg hurt really bad if there was any pressure on it, like six to eight kind of range if there was pressure directly on the painful spots, which is why I was not able to use a prosthetic leg at all, no matter what we tried. But if I wasn't putting pressure on it, it kind of resided at like a four or three or four, not comfortable, but not something that was keeping me up at night. Most nights, not something that I thought about every second of every day, just kind of existed in the background. A couple months later, I had another surgery to fix those issues, didn't quite work, and then eventually had to have another two inches taken off my leg in August of 2019. So in August of 2019, the whole process kind of restarted because they cut my leg off again, like the remaining little bit of it. And I'd say the process was pretty similar again. In the hospital, it was not fun. It was painful. It was like a six to an eight most days, but yay for good drugs. I had a cast on for four weeks that time. It hurt. It wasn't great, but it was tolerable thanks to pain medications. And once the cast came off, it wasn't as bad that time. And I was able to start getting fitted for a prosthesis about seven weeks after that second amputation. So now that brings us to today really, which is I want to say about 18 months after the actual leg amputation. What does it feel like on a daily basis pain wise? Most of the time it's okay. Most of the time it's like a two or three, it aches a little bit. Sometimes I don't feel it at all. Most of the time I don't think about it. I'll get those phantom pain spikes that are really painful a couple times a day, sometimes more. Sometimes I go a day without having them at all. This does shift a little bit when I'm wearing my prosthetic leg. So if I'm wearing it consistently, it does still get aggravated. We're still trying to figure out everything that's going on in the right fit for my leg. And there's sharp pain and I'm not sure quite what that is. But if I have something on it, I'd say the pain starts to climb a little bit to like a four or five. But if I'm not actively interacting with it or touching or putting pressure on it, it's like it like I said like a one to a three. It's honestly okay. It's truly incredible to me how our bodies can heal from stuff like this and get better and get better in a relatively fast time frame. When you're going through it, like in the midst of hurting and losing a body part, it does not feel like it's fast. It feels excruciatingly long. But in retrospect, if you look at it in the course of most people's lifetimes, it's a small amount of time that the pain is really, really bad for most people. And then most people get to a place where it's either completely non-existent or very tolerant. I have one friend who had an amputation surgery, woke up from it, was in pain from like the amputation itself, never had any phantom pain, and is thoroughly functional. He does not have any issues with pain, which is so awesome. I have other friends where their situation is more challenging than mine after they've lost a leg. Pain is more of an issue. It's hard to get under control. Phantom pain's worse for them. There are a lot of variables that go into this, but I'm not going to talk from a scientific perspective because I'm not a scientist. I don't know the statistics, but most amputees I talk to do deal with some kind of pain. But from what they've expressed to me, it's not at a point where it cripples their life every day. A lot of people deal with prosthetic issues. Prosthetic issues can cause pain. It is really hard to get a prosthesis to fit exactly the way it needs to. I think prosthetists are amazing, but a lot of it's kind of a guessing game and trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn't. So the process of going through getting fitted for something and getting it to work right can really be difficult. For instance, we're in the middle of that for me right now, right? And I just put my leg on my leg for the first time in six weeks, which felt really good to be able to do. And it hurt, like again, just to sign numbers so that there's some kind of reference point, like a six. Six or six. Yeah, give it a six to put any pressure on it. And if I'm actually trying to walk normally, it just wasn't going to happen. So there are issues that arise. Sometimes they don't know why it feels bad. Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night and really hurts. There are a variety of things that help. Like I said, mirror therapy has been really helpful. Desensitization, I always say that word wrong. I think I got it right at that time. Massage, touch. Those things have all been really helpful for me. So the moral of the story here that I'm trying to tell is that it's going to be a different journey for everybody. If you're watching this video because you found it through some Google search about how much does it actually hurt to have your leg chopped off or something like that because that's something you're facing. First of all, I'm really sorry that that's something you're facing. It can be scary and weird and overwhelming and confusing and all different kinds of things. But I just want to remind you that you're not alone. There's a huge community of super supportive amputees out here who will help you along the way with so many of your questions. I have found Facebook groups to be especially helpful if you just search amputee support on Facebook. There are a lot of groups that are really active and answered a lot of my questions as I was going through things. And I hope that I was able to answer some of your questions about the pain aspect of it. How much it hurts, how much it doesn't. Again, that may not be the case for you. You may feel fantastic a few days after your amputation. I have heard stories of that but most people do deal with pain after losing a body part but most people do not deal with that pain for the rest of their lives. At least not to an extent that is not manageable or that there are tactics for addressing. Thanks for listening to me guys. You may be able to tell my voice is going out a little bit so I should probably stop talking but I really appreciate you spending a few minutes here with me today. If you want to give this video a thumbs up. It helps to get out to more people and helps the old YouTube algorithm and I'd appreciate it. But thank you guys for your time. I'm so happy to be back. I hope to have another video to you soon. We'll see what my body allows me to do but I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.