Hi everybody! This is Christina, the Amputee OT.
In this video i'm going to give you an update on my residual limb after i had revision surgery
*Mechanical whirring*.
By the way if, you want a longer version of this video you can become my
patron on Patreon-- link is in the description. All right so as you can see it's been
almost three weeks since i had my revision surgery and i no longer have any sutures
or staples in my residual limb. So I'll show you a couple of pictures of my residual limb with the
sutures and the staples in it; and then a picture of my residual limb with just the sutures in it.
So as you can see, it's healed pretty well. It looks more or less somewhat the same as it was before my
residual-- before the surgery. Before I had-- in my surgery, I had a scar that went to *here*, and the
surgeon had to open up my leg a little bit more down here in order to do the TMR. TMR is Targeted
Muscle Re-innervation. So what he did is, he took this nerve here-- which is the femoral nerve-- and he
attached it to some redundant motor nerves so that I will hopefully not have any
phantom pain. And on this side, the-- my suture line used to end right here; and it still ends
exactly right there --so he didn't really do a whole lot of changes. What I think is really
interesting is the surgeon chose to use sutures and staples, which i've never seen before; and I
tried to google "sutures and staples" to see why he did that; and I couldn't really find anything, um
so the sutures were kind of cutting into my skin --so that's what these long lines are.
These long lines are from the sutures; and then these little short ones are from the staples and
my femur ends about there. The other thing he did was wrap this muscle around the end of my femur; so
kind of like this-- so that it covers the end of my femur. So now, even three weeks after my surgery,
i can move my leg all around like this-- and it does not hurt. Maybe a little bit sore
at the end here--I can I can touch and massage and squeeze my residual limb-- basically no pain; except
for that a little bit of soreness in here. Only time it's sort of painful is if I bend --
If i bend over kind of far like this, I get this tingling sensation right in here.
It's not uh really important for prosthetic use to be in that position;
but it is definitely a nerve pain that's happening when I do that .
What i'm doing right here is i'm extending my knee flexing, my knee. Extending my knee,
flexing the knee. Extension and flexion. It's interesting that it's not an up and down
motion anymore. It's like a back and forth motion. When I turn my hip, you can see
my residual limb is moving now ; whereas in the last video, it really wasn't moving at all. The femur
just moved inside the residual limb without any motion from the residual limb. But now when I turn it,
since the surgeon attached the muscles to the bone, now it causes my skin to move .
That will lead to greater control of my prosthesis, because i will be able to
do internal and external rotation, which will lead to internal and external rotation of my foot--
which will provide me with more control of my prosthesis when i'm ready to wear it. Yay
extension, flexion. Extension, flexion. Extension flexion. Extension, flextio. Extension,
flexion. External rotation, internal rotation . External rotation, internal rotation.
These two marks here are the scars from my drains. I had two drains in there for like ,
five days or something-- so that's like a vampire bite. My tattoo kind of looks like a photoshop now.
Like a weird photoshop. My leg looks like a whale --oh oh it's so cute little whale .
It''s a cute little whale. Kind of sore right there, probably from me working out. Okay, I'm done.
Okay that's all for now! I hope you enjoy this video . If you have any questions, you can leave them
in the comment section below. You can subscribe to follow my journey; and thanks for watching! Bye!