 Well, hello my beautiful internet friends. I'm gonna do my best to get through this without crying, but I don't think that's gonna happen. So I have my Irish breakfast comfort tea, also my Ireland tourist comfort hoodie. Enough pointless rambling, it is the night before we leave to go back home and I have a tell if anyone wants to know. If I bite my lip like this, it means I'm definitely trying not to cry if you ever wanted to know. I have been blessed by so much and so I don't want to sound ungrateful by any of this. I don't want to go home and it's not like vacation was great, I don't want it to end kind of thing. I mean I've definitely experienced that before we all have. It's fun going and doing cool things, especially in a fricking fantastic country. Four days after I get home I will have surgery on now multiple issues because they've definitely gotten worse being here like the like the bursa which you guys know about which is like on the one side of my leg and then there's the osteocyte I guess which is on the other side but it's gotten significantly larger and almost matches the same size as the bursa and looks the same so I don't even know what's going on with it and they're gonna do surgery and they're gonna hopefully fix things but I'll tell you what, I really believe in the power of hope as I've said many times and how important it is. I have a tattoo down my body in many different forms but when you have the history over and over again that things don't work like the way that they're supposed to that surgeries don't go the way that they're supposed to that recovery never goes the way that it's supposed to that weird things always go wrong that weird things always happen that I am always kind of a not a medical mystery but just shit happens that's not that's not supposed to it's hard it's so hard to believe that things will go right and that this will go fine and oh it'll just be you know an easy surgery and I'll recover and in four to six weeks I'll get recast it for a prosthetic and it'll be good from there and I'll learn to walk and one day I'll be running all of that and in this moment I really I just really can't see that and being here I've gotten to do so much gotten to like walk a lot and hike and breathtaking sacred places and go on a boat ride and like gotten tastes of so many things but along with that comes the sting of all that I can't do and all the pain that those things cause like they always have because like my whole life has always been doing things even though they hurt because like you know I had a fused ankle from age 15 onward and it hurt but I still did things because I wanted to participate in life and I feel like I am cursed to live that same life forever I know I'm not I know I'm not cursed to that but like I said holding on to hope that somehow magically things will be different when my experience tells me the opposite is hard and leaves me feeling empty and like my wares have just been ripped out time for some comfort tea quick poll how many of you guys leave your tea bag in when you're drinking tea versus not my mom that was like her biggest pet peeve growing up but my dad always left his tea bag in and so I feel like I'm split on the issue debate in the comment section below I just feel like I've gotten punched by this wave of depression and I feel like like if I talk to people about it like my best friend Abby who's here understands she gets it and and Brian gets it like he really wants me to be hopeful but for the most part people don't understand that like if you have had 14 years of experience of things never going right for random reasons that don't make sense it's really hard to believe that they will go right but I feel like it's really important to believe that things will go well because like your mindset is so important in the healing process and so I already feel like I'm like failing by thinking that it's not gonna go well and maybe I'm just really tired from a lot of travel but I'm scared and I don't want to do this I told that to Brian today and he was like that's okay babe like let's just postpone it let's push it back and I was like I can't do that like I cannot sit here and have no forward movement at all anymore like I was supposed to be freaking hiking by now like flat surfaces but like for you know according to estimations I could have been like walking miles by this point I can do some things thanks to the amazing tools that I've been given but I can't stay stuck anymore I have to move forward and moving forward means having surgery so I have to do this I can't push it back and I so don't want to be here I so don't want to do this I just want to run away from it I just want to pretend like none of this is happening I want to pretend like like none of this happens sometimes I feel like I'm too scared to allow myself to even consider the possibility of regret because I've always said that I don't regret this decision that I made to amputate my leg and I honestly haven't but in moments like these a little bit of doubt does creep in and it's like hey maybe I could have been walking around Ireland yeah you know chomping on painkillers but that's what I was doing anyways so maybe it would have been better to say comfortable and safe in what I knew even though what I knew was real crappy even though what I knew didn't work even though what I knew was really painful and was not a life I wanted to live I know that wasn't the answer that wasn't the right answer I did the best thing that I could I'm glad I did it but I'm so connected to my body like I love moving I love movement and I'm also really connected to my body and that I feel it all the time because so much of it hurts and not being able to do things knowing that the future is so uncertain is driving me and saying I guess part of me is beginning to wonder if it's ever going to get better part of me is be is beginning to wonder if I will always be stuck in this cycle of always being in pain and always just making the best of it and barely getting by and I think I let myself believe that having my leg amputated was that was a doorway a terrifying scary difficult doorway to freedom of sorts with a caveat of it comes with a lot of complications but freedom in that I could really do things again and maybe without significant pain maybe with some discomfort or whatever but I'm beginning to wonder if that's really the case if that will never be true if this is how I am doomed to live forever and the rational side of my brain knows that that is not true and is actively working to bring me out of the sadness and the hopelessness and the depression and is telling me that like no it's it's going to be okay you have to keep holding on you have to keep moving forward like keep working the steps take control of what you can control and accept help so on and so forth like there's all that but then there's like the emotional part of my brain that is just sinking and kind of losing it right now because again it's really hard to have faith in a future that people are promising you that has always been promised but has also never been the case but now that that is out my head hurts less because I feel like I've been like keeping that in all day and now that I've spoken it out I'm going to try to sit without reality but also put it on a temporary shelf and enjoy my last night here in Dublin we're back in a lovely hotel in Dublin so we can catch our flight out in the morning and I think we're gonna go downtown don't want to see people I don't want to do anything but I'm also not going to waste my last night here by being worried about a hypothetical future so I'm gonna finish my tea and lay down grip my teeth and move forward thank you for listening it means more than you guys will ever know to me I know I say that a lot but I really mean it the fact that you would choose to spend many minutes listening to me talk about my fears about the future and being scared and and all of that and all the encouraging messages that you write me even though I don't get a chance to respond to every comment I read them and they make a difference they really do and I'm so grateful thank you thank you thank you thank you I will keep you guys updated I love you guys I'm thinking of you and I'll talk to you soon bye guys onward to victory