 Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, and delightful internet friends. Today, we are going to be answering the question once and for all. YouTube moderators, this is a butter knife, it's harmless, I promise. If I were to stab my prosthetic foot with a knife when I was experiencing phantom pain, would it help? And if you have no idea why I'm asking this question, I get asked this pretty much constantly in the comment sections of a lot of videos because, in a very popular show by the name of Grey's Anatomy, there's a main character, Arizona Robins, who becomes an amputee, and there is a scene in which this happened. And the idea here is that that solved her phantom pain. Now, you and I both know that TV shows are not always strictly accurate to real life, so would this actually work? Does this work? Have I tried this? We're going to be answering that question and more in this video. But first, before we get to the foot stabbing, which is an excellent sentence to be able to say in a video for work, allow me to introduce you to my new friends at Half Day. Half Day is an app that seeks to improve happiness by a number of steps, one of the most important, which is posting a picture a day for yourself to look back upon. I've been doing this for about a week now, and it is a lovely reminder of the little things throughout my days that have brought me joy. But not only does Half Day focus on using photos to increase your happiness, as you're saving this photo for yourself, it also allows you to rate the quality of your day, which I think is a good moment to kind of reflect on how you've been feeling. It'll then show you statistics of how you've been feeling over time. It also gives you daily tasks. For instance, let's look at what today's is. Think of someone you are grateful for and write this person something nice. So as you're taking time every day to invest in your happiness and complete these little tasks, it also brings you along this course of unlocking new levels and new tasks, doing something like this, you know, posting a photo a day with a few notes about why it makes you happy and how you're feeling that day. I personally found it to be really helpful because I think it's easy to forget, to sound really cliche, the little moments. Even opening up the app today for this video, I was reminded of a picture I had taken just about a week ago and it brought a smile to my face. Half Day is totally free to download through your app store. However, if you use the code on screen, I've also placed a link in the description down below. You unlock things like unlimited posts, carousel type posts like we see on Instagram, also extended statistics and tracking of your personal growth. This is something that genuinely takes about three minutes a day to do and I think is a good reminder to invest in ourselves. So check Half Day out by clicking the link in my description to download it now. Let me know what you think and now let's get back to the moment we've all been waiting for, foot stabbing. Okay. Alments don't tend to grow with the popularity of these programs where very soon you have every sick kid in Africa banging down your door. I like the like super tense dramatic music. It's like what Grey's Anatomy does best. Is there tsunami force waves, Ellen? What is wrong with this woman? I mean, is she having a panic attack? Should she even be in the OR? No one is moving. I'm stripping the endocardium from the capillary muscle. I screwed this up. I have to replace the mitral valve. So don't move. I'm not gonna move. You tell me not to move. I'm not gonna move. Wrong, are you sick? Alex, take that scalpel. What? What are you doing? It's stabbing the foot. What? It's my prosthetics. I'm just really enjoying this. Okay, let's do it. Stab me. What is wrong with you? Dr. Brown, I'm the Chief of Surgery. This is an order. Stab Dr. Rob is in the front row. Yes. The trip. Let's analyze that scene a little bit. The first thought that I had been watching this is that I think personally speaking just for me and how my body is, I think it would be difficult to be a surgeon and deal with phantom pain because how I get it is like these electrical zaps of pain out of nowhere or like crazy bad cramping. I'll be 100% fine. And then like my husband, my friend's gonna test this. I'll kind of jump out of nowhere and like be grabbing my leg because it's extreme pain with no warning. So I think that would be really difficult. You really have to train your body not to react to that, which is hard to do when it feels like someone is literally stabbing you in the foot. So I think Arizona, you know, stepping away when she was experiencing that pain was really smart. My first thought looking at that was like, I've never almost fainted from phantom pain, but then again, it can get that bad for some people and also like stepping away from the table so she wasn't like jerking or jumping any movements while holding scalpels in someone's body was a good choice. So let's talk about the mechanics of phantom pain for just a moment here. First and foremost, it's not all in your head. It's not made up pain. Phantom pain is very real pain that you feel in a part of your body that simply isn't there anymore. When they chop your leg off, your nervous system doesn't necessarily get the signals like the map that your brain has of your body doesn't get updated that that body part isn't there anymore necessarily. So it still tries to send signals to it. And in doing so, you end up with some really wonky feedback that sometimes means you experience itching or pain or stabbing or burning. There are a variety of ways you can deal with that. Some medications help some people mirror therapy, something that's very effective. We'll go into that more in just a moment and also having a prosthetic and like touching the part of your foot that is feeling an itch or is in pain can be helpful. So let's talk about the foot stabbing. That was actually really funny to watch. I've not seen that scene before. For some reason I must have missed it. Allow us to use a harmless butter knife as demonstration. You know what's funny? Even as I'm like pretending to threaten my foot here I feel my foot tensing up. Like I kind of feel more tingly. It's almost like those nerves are like resisting for impact, right? But like, if I do that, I feel it for half a second. I feel the knife hit my foot for just a moment before my brain realizes it's not actually there. One of the most bizarre things that I kind of discovered on accident once was a friend was like joking about giving me a foot massage and like grab my prosthetic foot and by anticipating what I was gonna feel by watching her do that I felt her hands around my foot. So when you are experiencing some kind of phantom sensation episode doing things like hitting your foot or itching it or whatever can actually really help. So when Arizona asks Karev to stab her foot with a scalpel, first off, I'm really glad that he chose the right one and went with the prosthetic one instead of her meat foot. That would have been very unfortunate for her. And you notice in the footage, footage, get it? I'm sorry. I think they did a decent job of depicting this because she's watching as he does it, right? She's looking at it. And for me anyways, a big part of easing phantom sensation is actually seeing something happen to this part of my body. They don't go into detail about what specifically, like what type of pain she was experiencing but even having something like that that would kind of like interrupt all of the signals in your body by being stabbed in the foot. Could I imagine sort of shock it into being okay again? When I talk about this stuff, sometimes I feel like I am in a sci-fi movie or novel because it's so mind blowing to me that our brains do this. So let's talk about mirror therapy for just a moment. This is another thing that people often ask me about in relation to Grey's Anatomy. Does it work and what is it? So I'll link a video down below that I did on mirror therapy, but it's essentially tricking your brain into thinking that your other leg is still there and moving it and it can be very therapeutic for your brain. So I'm gonna begin by rocking my leg back and forth and notice that the whole time I'm looking in the mirror at the other side at the reflection of my good leg and I'm picturing the whole time that I have both legs. Thinking logically, this always kind of seemed counterproductive to me because like wouldn't you want your brain to acknowledge and come to peace with the fact that your leg is gone but science shows otherwise that doing things like mirror therapy can be really effective for relieving signs and symptoms of phantom sensation. For me personally, it was incredibly helpful especially as I was first adjusting to my amputation and having really bad phantom pain. Mirror therapy doesn't work super well for me in the moment if I'm experiencing phantom pain, pulling out a mirror and trying that trick doesn't do too much for me unfortunately but for a lot of people it can be very, very effective. So one of the things that a lot of people commented in the other Grey's Anatomy reaction video that I did is that they kind of just forgot about her prosthetic as the show went on, which for a major show that has a lot of funding behind it I think is rather unfortunate because I can't forget about my prosthetic leg. If I do, I can't walk. However, when I looked a little deeper into the issue I did see some fan theories. They didn't forget, oh, don't drop your computer. They didn't forget about it at all rather something like this was used. So prosthetic cover like this is actually entirely plausible. They actually make them look really realistic and I'm guessing that the show did put this cover on her prosthetic leg to allow the actress to keep playing Arizona Robbins without having to pay a lot of money for CGI. So we're gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and say that in scenes later on in the seasons where it appears like she has two good legs again, not that you aren't good, you're just different. Maybe it was just a fantastically done prosthetic cover. Personally, I've never looked into getting a prosthetic cover. It's just never really interested me that much but I know a lot of people that just help their self-confidence, self-esteem. It's more of what they wanna present to the world and how they wanna look. And so that's an option that a lot of people have. Long story short, phantom pain is a really fascinating thing and sometimes trying bizarre and silly things might be really effective. I will say that maybe don't stab your own prosthetic foot with a real knife because these things aren't cheap to repair. Like to get a new foot shell, which is this rubber part which is what you would definitely pierce by stabbing it is at least a few hundred dollars. Thank you for coming on this phantom pain foot stabbing journey with me today. Sometimes I like doing these reaction videos. They're just kind of fun and lighthearted and I feel like I can answer some questions in the process. However, if you have additional questions about prosthetics, phantom pain, anything along those lines leave them in the comments section down below. I may do a video answering your question in the near future. A big thank you to my new friends at half day for partnering with me for this video. Half day can be a fantastic way to take a few minutes out of your day to invest in your happiness. Like I said, use the download link down below linked in the description, not only to support this channel but I'm also interested to hear what you have to say. If you like this app, if you find that it also increases your daily happiness let me know and to my beautiful patrons over on Patreon, thank you so much for choosing to invest in what I'm doing here. I could not do this without you and I am truly so grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you. To you watching this video right now you could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else and you chose to hang out with me for a few minutes here and I really appreciate that. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Mwah, bye guys. By the way, I know that this room is really, really echoey and I appreciate you sticking around with me for it. This was supposed to be a video set at one point. Then I just turned it into a coffee nook but I felt like giving it a shot today. So, let me know what you think. Mwah, bye.