 Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. I have a treat for you guys today because I know that you, like me, have probably spent sleepless nights wondering how much does it cost to have a limb chopped off? How much does it cost to have an amputation? And boy, do I have an answer for you today because I just got the bill for my second leg amputation. If you are new to my channel, I have had two leg amputations, but on the same leg. So they amputated it once in October of 2018 and that didn't take. That didn't work. I had a bad fall which influenced it and I had to eventually have my leg amputated a second time. They trimmed another two inches off in August of this past year, 2019. And you may not know this if you're not based in the United States, but our hospital systems are not known for being efficient or quick with their billing. And so I have just recently received the bill for my amputation back in August. Are you ready for this? Because I'm not. Brace yourselves. I hope you're ready. The number that I am about to show you is for the hospital and only the hospital. This is for the facility to have the amputation and then also I had to stay there for a number of days afterwards in recovery, which is very normal. You usually spend three to five days in the hospital this time I was in there for five. I'm curious what you think this is going to be. If you would, if you feel like it, pause the video right now and then scroll down to the comment section and let me know what you think it's going to be. You know, I really feel like if I was being a good YouTuber, I would do more to build suspense and all of that, but I can't think of anything else to say because my brain is kind of dead at this point. And this is how much it cost. I went into the hospital on August 27th, 2019 and came out with a $118,000 hospital bill. As you can clearly see, I'm smiling, so I don't cry. It's also a little bit uncomfortable that there's a $666 bill right above that, but we're just going to breeze over that and pretend like it doesn't matter. Oh, so I just scrolled up a little bit and there are three $666 bills. I'm not superstitious, but that does look kind of funny. So as you can see, this is not the only bill related to these dates. We have $666, $666, 104, that's doable. Another $666, we have a $54, almost $100 bill. We have a $1,800 bill. We have a $1,300 bill. We have a $1,900 bill. And that's it. That's it. That's it for this amputation. So let's add all of that up real quick. Okay, so this is going to include the day of surgery, time spent in the hospital, and the doctors and specialists who were involved. All right, we have up until August 30th. So there's $666 times three, 104, $118,557, 75. Don't forget the cents there. 53, 18, 1810, 1357. And last but not least, 1965. All in all, this comes out to a delicate $131,000. I feel like that is a number that I legitimately have a hard time comprehending. So let us draw some comparisons. I used to work in real estate and I know from personal experience that you can buy a house in the state of Colorado for $131,000. It won't be the nicest house in town. It might not be in the best neighborhood, but you can get a house that is standing and you can put furniture in and repaint and make look nice. You can buy a house that you're going to live in for years for the cost of leg amputation. What kind of fancy cars could we get? This is what I'm really interested in. We could get a 2019 Lexus LX. That looks really boring. I don't like that car. We could get a 2018 Land Rover Range Rover Velar. Actually, these cars are pretty cool. My husband's really into cars and so we'll go to car shows and stuff like that. And I actually really like this car. If I bought that car, I would have over $30,000 left, which I could use to buy more puppy toys and travel to Ireland again and still have like $25,000 left over. We could get a Cadillac. These cars are really pretty. I could get a Jaguar F type. What else costs $100,000? The most interesting things you could buy for $100,000. Let's take a look. I could have gotten a live jet pack. Why didn't no one tell me this? Because I could have bought that instead of chopping my leg off and then flown everywhere. I could rescue like all of the German shepherds in the entire world, which I would totally do. Look at that little face. This is Sophie. If you don't know, she's one of my puppies. I could have rented a private jet three times. Sweet Jesus. It's expensive. Eight of the most expensive. Eight? Only eight of the most expensive pieces ever. I could rent a friend for a year. I guess it's a good thing that service exists, but it's still really sad. Keep in mind that that $131,000 was for the second time I had this done, meaning that they didn't actually have to dispose of a leg this time. They just had to dispose of leg pieces. That's uncomfortable to say. So let's take a look at what my other one cost. Here we go. October 11th, 2018. There we go. $69,000. Just about $70,000. Plus $111,000. Plus $4400,000. Plus $200,000. Plus $200,000. That's it. So to get it done the first time, which was at a different facility with a different doctor, was only like $80,000 all put together. I did only have to spend three days in the hospital that time, so I'm certain that that has a large impact on the cost there. This might go without saying, but also keep in mind that this is not any of the follow-up. So once you lose your leg and you get out of the hospital, you're not done. There's doctor's visits, there's medications, and most expensively, there's prosthetics. So I may do a whole different video on that, but the cost of prosthetics is pretty astronomical. It's pretty high. I've talked about it in passing before, but my leg, sunshine, this little foot right here, my prosthetic leg for just the prosthetic itself, not the additional sockets that I've needed, not the actual prosthetics appointments. Not any of that was close to $20,000. And if you're interested in seeing a video about the specifics of that, I'd be happy to break it down and talk about the ongoing costs. There are so many different pieces to becoming an amputee that are worth considering, and I'm not complaining about any of this. Please understand that. I just kind of wanted to talk about it and share the reality of it. I do want to point out that I do have insurance, meaning that I do not have to pay these full costs. If that is the case, we would not be living in a house. We would be living on the street. No one has that kind of money lying around, or very few people. Seeing these numbers, it really makes me wonder what people do who don't have any insurance, who have major life things happen, because you can't predict when something's going to happen. You can't predict when someone has a major medical issue coming up or gets in an accident, and sometimes you need medical care. And if you don't have insurance, or you have really bad insurance that doesn't cover anything, which a lot of people do have, what are you going to do? For the average person, $130,000 trying to pay that off would take the rest of your life and would definitely drive you into bankruptcy. So insurance covers part of this. It does not cover all of it, but I'm really grateful that we have helped with this in the form of the insurance that we pay for. Though before I faced all this, I didn't really wonder what it cost to get my leg chopped off. If I'd seen an article about how much it would cost, I think I'd be interested. So I want to kind of share that information with you guys. It is just, it's honestly astounding to me how much it can cost. So there you have it. If you ever wondered to yourself, how much does limb chopping cost? What could I get that for? Please don't ever wonder that. Keep your limbs. But now you know, it is real pricey. You could get a nice brand new Range Rover, you could get a flying freaking jet pack and not have to get a leg amputation on the first place. They really should have told me about that one. You could hire a friend for a year. There are many things you could do with that kind of money, but it is pretty darn pricey. It's expensive. It's it's crushingly expensive. So I'm not here to make any kind of statement on universal health care or Medicare for all or anything like that. But I think it is really interesting having conversations with people from different countries because on this kind of a platform, I get comments from people in Europe and Canada and Australia and all over the place. And so often they are surprised by what health care here costs. I remember one conversation in particular where I post a link for a GoFundMe for an acquaintance of mine who had to have a second amputation and it was going to be close to $250,000 because of the complications and the specifics of what she was dealing with. And someone messaged me, I think almost thinking that it was a scam and was like, why would you need anywhere near that amount of money for a surgery and a hospital stay? And I was like, well, it's the way that our country works. And we had a conversation about it. And she was honestly astounded and like floored that it costs anything near that it costs what some people make in their lifetime. It costs what most people in the United States make in like five years. And here's the thing, there are a lot of really skilled people involved in this process who need to be compensated fairly for what they do. I think that's really important. But at the same time, I don't think that this should be so inaccessible that if you don't have good insurance, and even if you do have good insurance, you're still going to be in debt. I think it's really interesting to talk about these kind of numbers, two videos that go out to people all around the world to just talk about the fact that different countries have different systems. And maybe there is a better way of doing it. And maybe there isn't. But if you are in a different country from the United States, what do you think about things like this? What do you think about costs like this? Do you think that it makes sense? Are you happy with the way your healthcare runs? I'm curious, I would love to know more. Alright, that's it for me. I'm going to go continue to laugh instead of cry. And I'd be curious to hear your responses and your thoughts in the comment section down below. A huge thank you to all my patrons over on Patreon who support this channel in these videos. I really appreciate you. And to you watching this video, thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me learning about how much it costs to have an amputation because that's probably not something you started your day thinking you'd be wondering about. But you're welcome. Now you know. Thanks guys. I love you. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video.