Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Life and Limb, a podcast from Thrive Magazine all about living well with limb loss or limb difference. I'm Jeff Thiessen, publisher of Thrive magazine and your podcast host.
My guest this episode is Kevin Gray, co founder and CEO of a relatively new organization for our Limb Loss and Limb Difference community.
After losing both legs below his knees to diabetes just a few years ago, Kevin quickly discovered the power of connection.
And during his rehab and recovery, he met other amputees who were searching for something very similar that he. He was honesty, honest conversations and hope from people who had been there.
And those early conversations became the roots for something much greater. Today, Kevin is the founder and CEO of Limb Loss Cat Connection, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting and supporting amputees. Kevin, welcome. How are you?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Hey, Jeff, good to see you. Thanks for the opportunity to talk on your podcast.
Yeah, it's. It's a privilege.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Privilege is all ours. New organization. We're going to talk about that and, and your story.
You know, I definitely want to. To ask you about your personal experience, of course, with, with the amputation from re. Rehab to home to. To now.
And I'm sure a lot of that experience has served as the impetus for, for the new organization, so. It has. I'll bet it has. So let's start with that new organization, Limb Loss Connection, as it lives and breathes today.
What exactly is it? What's its purpose?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, well, listen, you're right. In rehab, we found a gap that's really good. Good support, a good place to find all the information we need.
We were in rehab. We didn't know how to buy a wheelchair. We didn't know how to, you know, what, anything about prosthetics and what choices there were.
We didn't know when we get home what that's going to look like. And so we just wish that there was one place that everybody could connect.
And so we launched Limb Loss Connection.
But it's more than just a support group and offering support.
We do everything from inpatient peer support, where we go to the hospitals and visit them bedside, we go to the rehab centers, we'll phone them up and do a virtual call.
That's all our support stuff we do.
Every second Sunday, we host a large group for our discussions. But now we're starting to break that up and segment that.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: So.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: So we're starting to have conversations where, you know, the support is around everybody that has diabetes and is either about to lose a limb or will lose a limb. And then there's another support group we're looking at for vascular disease and another one for motorcycle accidents.
Because when you connect, we really feel like connection's the key to what we're doing.
But we also want to connect with the people that can relate to what we're going through.
We're trying to do that.
Then even lower body, upper body quads, bilateral amputees, it's nice to talk to others that are going through the same thing, that have lost the same limbs. We're doing some of that.
The big picture for limb loss is that we have all these support groups all over the country in Canada, and there might be 20 people here, 10 people there, 15 here. And there's no standards or anything of how they deliver their content.
Is it honest content and is it valid content?
So we want to start bringing those groups into us and start working with them and have. Have all of us work together, rather than all of us in different segments and. And not really connected that way.
We also want to bring in, you know, wound specialists and doctors and psychiatrists and. And, you know, physiotherapists all into the realm of this because they. They do their job, though. A nurse, a wound nurse will do their job in. In rehab, but that's all they do is wound care.
But they don't understand the mental.
Component of that. They don't understand the worrisomes, the isolation, those types of things. They don't work with those types of things. So we want to train them, we want to teach them and enable them to do some of that.
Then the bigger picture is we really want to have one great big conference here in Toronto and then switch it each year, like maybe out in Montreal, maybe it's out in Calgary, but we want to have one big conference. They do this in the States and it goes over well, where all the amputees come in and they get to see what kind of products are out there.
They get to hear lectures and learning workshops, they get to hear keynotes, those types of things. And that kind of goes back to my background. I've worked in software, Jeff, all my life, and I've organized events, big, large events. And so that's my goal, that's my dream for limb loss, is to really create that sense of connection with everyone.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, Just hearing what you're saying. I mean, my rehab experience is almost five decades old now.
Long in the tooth, you might say, as. As a seasoned amputee. But it surprises me to hear that there's still that siloing. You might say, when you talked about the wound care specialist and we do talk about our healthcare team from physios, OTs, REC, therapists. Is it all happening in isolation still?
[00:06:28] Speaker B: I wouldn't say that that part is the problem. Like, when I went to rehab, the whole team came in, which was great. In my rehab, the first rehab that I went to, the teams weren't, were all scattered all over the place. You didn't know what doctor was seeing you, you didn't know what was happening, like. And I eventually checked myself out of that place and I went down to our major, one of our major hospitals here in Toronto.
And, you know, it was wonderful because everybody came together. It was like there was a psychiatrist on the room, there was my doctor, there was wound care specialist, ot, pt. Everybody was there. I think the janitor was there.
But. But everybody was there and they were telling you what to expect.
And that's great, but as soon as you leave the hospital, you, you don't have that anymore. You don't have that connection. So wouldn't it be nice to have every couple weeks, you know, a guest speaker on a virtual call that can come in and answer questions for own. You're having trouble with a wound. Maybe it's, you know, very small, but you don't know how to address it, or should you go to ER or should you get, you know, a PSW to come in and look at it?
You know, it's just giving some of that advice out there and people, you know, the big component is mental health. Right. When you lose a limb in the beginning, anyway, a lot of people go through a hard time and they struggle and so wouldn't it be nice to have, you know, a psychiatrist come in and, and counsel people on, on, you know, one of those segmented virtual calls?
So, yeah, that's, that's kind of where we are right now. But if I talk to all the people I talk to say the same thing. And this is all through Canada and United States.
Some of them are in isolation and have no one to talk to at all. They don't have family or friends.
They're. They're. One guy I was speaking with lost his leg and he had a wound on his leg, so he was stuck in his wheelchair, but he didn't have anybody to go out and get groceries for him. He was very depressed, alone, isolated. And that shouldn't happen in, in today's world. We should be able to connect everybody together so that they have that kind of, you know, outlet. And yeah, I wanted to ask you
[00:09:00] Speaker A: too, when you talked about peer visit. So, I mean, there's got to be some responsibility or accountability to that. And I know the Amputee Coalition of Canada has a certification program.
How does your organization approach that?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so you nailed it on the head. So we're working with acc, we're partnered with them and we are, there's a number of us that are our peer support visitors. We've gone through their programming training and some of us, myself included, have gone through the Train the Trainer program.
And so we're or our organization is enabled to deliver those peer visit sessions to people. And so I think that's really important. That's what goes back to the standards that I'm talking about. Everybody should have some kind of certification when they're giving advice to people and whatnot in these peer visits. And you know, I hear it all the time. I've gone to different virtual calls, different groups and you hear them giving advice on medical stuff. You know, hey, this is the prosthetic that you should get.
You shouldn't be doing that. It's up to the prosthesis that's doing that, you know, and so that's not the kind of support we deliver.
We, we deliver that. You know, hey, if you've got a wound, let's, let's talk about it. Oh, well, that sounds pretty serious. We better get you into the er. I would go today or we might counsel somebody. You know, hey, my, my prosthetic isn't fitting quite right. Well, we don't tell them what to do or get a, get, you know, get a new insert or anything like that. We tell them they better get back to their prosthetist to work that out and not give up on them because some people do, they just give up and, and don't get the help that they need.
Right. So we're there for them.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds great. You to talk about leaning into in the future sort of topic specific or demographic specific group. So yes, upper extremity amputees, I think we're 1 in 10 of the total amputee population. So yeah, don't forget us the forgotten ones. We'll.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: And this is it. There's, I'm learning that there's not a lot of support for upper, upper limbs.
And you know, we've got several people registered with us that are all upper limb people and some quad.
And in fact one, one my co, my co founder Chris is a quad.
He lost four limbs to sepsis. He's 38 years old.
Anyway, so somebody that we were talking to down in the States, down in Florida is also a quad, but they don't have any support.
So we said, well, you know, we've got four or five people registered here just on this one call. Why don't we segment that out for a call with all the quads? And that's been running ever since we did that because they're able to talk about what is impacting them specifically. They can't reach stuff off the counter, they can't know, brush their teeth easily, they can't tie their shoes.
So there's solutions to most of those things, as you. You probably know, but you've got to hear about them and even learn about them.
Chris is actually doing some videos to show people how he operates, like how he, you know, writes with a pen, how he works with the computer, how he brushes his teeth.
All these things that you have to learn when you're brand new to this. Right?
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: I think for upper amputees and I'm a double bilateral and friends that are single, we all have the same unsolvable problem that remains. None of us have been able to figure out how to put the plastic bread bag tab back on the bread bag on the kitchen counter. So if you hear of a solution, let me know.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: I thought it was going to be peeling banana or something because I can't imagine
[00:13:17] Speaker A: the dreaded battlefield of the. The bread bag tab.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: You're a volunteer, and I don't know if that's the plan long term, but when we first met you, you said something along the lines of, I've never worked so hard for so little. So you're all in on this, right?
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I am totally in on this. I was, you know, I kind of forced to retire at 59 when all this happened.
I wasn't. It's not just my legs that I've lost, but I've lost my kidneys. My kidneys have shut down. So I'm on dialysis three times a week and, you know, a lot of health issues that way. But I've got to keep going. I got to stay positive. That's the only way you're going to survive this. But I had to retire because I couldn't do what I did before.
And that was a product marketer traveling all over the place, standing on stage, delivering, you know, speeches and things like that, talking with customers. It was. It's just too exhausting. You can't. Can't do it when you have dialysis and. And kidney failure and, you know, trying to learn to walk properly. Right. So I retired and I. It's one of the best things I've done because now I have freedom to do what I really want. And what I really want is to have an impact on the world. I want to have purpose. I want to help people.
So I'm so glad to be out of the corporate world, to be honest with you, Jeff.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: I've heard that before, too. Yeah.
How long ago did you lose your first leg? I'm assuming you didn't lose them together.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I didn't. Let's see, the summer of 2023, I stepped on something sharp. It must have been a screw or a piece of glass or something like that.
And I didn't notice that. I kept walking around the house with this in my foot.
And one day I put my feet up on the coffee table. I know my wife hates that, but she was glad I did it this time because she noticed a wound that was, you know, yay big. It was, like, size of a tennis ball sort of thing. And it was deep and didn't look good.
So I rushed into the er.
I was very sick at that point, and they told me I was going septic, and so they had to get me on some antibiotics really quickly, and they did that, and that's what shut my kidneys down, because antibiotics are really hard on your kidneys. So the antibiotic. But it was something like, you either do this or you lose your life. Right? Septic is not something you fool around with.
And so I was in the hospital, and they. They came a few days later and said, we're gonna have to take your leg. And I said, well, why would you have to take my leg? My toes are the only thing that's impacted here. Just take them.
The orthodox doctor said, no, we're gonna have to take it. A second one came in, told me the same thing.
And then I told them, I want to talk to a vascular surgeon.
And they came in and said, yeah, let's take your toes, Kevin. It's worth a try, but it will be a hard healing process.
Well, that was understatement. For the next five years, Four, four and a half, five years, I tried to save my leg, but it just kept getting infected and getting, you know, and it was like wound care every two days had a vacuum on it.
Had to go up to wound care to get them to re bandage things up and redress it.
I got it right down to a small, tiny, the size of a dime, and had that closed up, I would have kept my leg.
And I couldn't get that dime to hold to heal up. And eventually it went into my bones.
And once it goes into your bones, it will travel quickly up your leg. And so you have to, you have to cut the bone off.
Some people will go in and try to. Try to scrape it off the bone and clean it up and whatnot. But the doctors told me, no, it's just going to keep coming back.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Was. So they took less of a timeline with the second leg.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: So. Yes.
So what, what happened from there is I said, just go ahead and take the left leg.
And that's what, what, how I, I lost my first one.
I then, I then did rehab and was walking on a prosthetic in no time, and they told. Discharged me from inpatient, and I went home, and they told me to come back for outpatient rehab. So I did. I worked out on the Tuesday.
I worked on, on Thursday, and on the Thursday, they said, well, let's check your residual limb. Let's make sure there's no, you know, blisters or anything. They did. That was fine. But they looked on my right leg. Sorry, my left leg, and they found a tiny blister in between my little toe and the next toe over.
And it's kind of like one of those blisters that you get when you break the yard, you know, and it pops up and bubbles up.
I thought, why are we worried about this? This is nothing. Anyway, they said, we'll see the doctor on Monday and get it cleaned up, make sure that it's going to be okay.
Well, by Sunday night, Jeff, my, my toes had all turned black.
That quick? And they said I knew what was going to happen. So they said, well, we can save your toes. I said, no, take the leg.
I'm not doing that again.
And so they, So I had my second amputation.
My first amputation in February. My second amputation in June.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Oh, my.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: How are you doing today?
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Today I'm doing great. I feel, I feel positive. I feel optimistic.
Never been happier, really, to be honest with you.
You know, I, I, My son is in university right now studying life sciences at McMaster, and he's doing well, so, you know, I can't complain about that.
Yeah, no, life is good.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Some challenges, I mean, challenges. You're into honest conversations.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: What, what, What's.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: What frustrates you?
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Well, I'll tell you what frustrates me. Going back to how I'm doing.
I am walking again. Like, I'm up on both my, my legs, so I'm pretty proud of that.
Not easy to walk bilateral, but I am Walking, I can get pretty far. Like, I can go down to my neighbor's place and back, which is. Which is, you know, half a mile or so and so. And then I can walk in malls and do grocery shopping and things like that. So I use a cane for the most part, but if I. If I'm going somewhere for a long time, I use my walker just to be safe, and I'll just continue to work out and keep. Keep plugging away at it because I know that I'm going to get there.
What frustrates me, Jeff, is not being able to do the things I want to do. And I. I'm not a patient man. I want to do things today.
And so when I look out the window here and I see my. My neighbors shoveling my driveway for me, well, I feel guilty. I want to do that myself. And, you know, in the summertime, they're cutting my grass and I'm like, I want to cut my grass. You know, and so that all frustrates me, just looking around at the things that I used to be able to do. When I had my amputations, I sold my bikes. I used to ride bikes quite a bit and had to sell them. And, you know, I was kind of down about that, but now it's like there's other bikes to. To, you know, the incumbent bikes that you can do with adaptive sports. So I'm going to get one of those this summer, and, yeah, things are going to be good.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's adapting for sure. It's funny, you talk about the cutting the grass, so every four or five years. So I'm super independent. Like I say, I've had. I've been a prosthetic wearer for almost 50 years, but every four or five years, I need to get a little bit of plastic surgery work done on, you know, bone spurs or bursas, and it keeps me out of one arm for four to six weeks.
And, you know, and that happens in the summer. There's nothing more I want to do is cut the grass.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: If I could just cut the grass. Yeah, that. That I get back in my socket. That. That feeling.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: I don't know that I felt that way when I. When I had legs, though, you know?
[00:22:12] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: Cutting again. But now it's like I really want to cut the grass.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: That's what we. What we can't do.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: You will.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: I'm sure you will, and hopefully complain about it when you finally get there. Yeah. Like the rest of us, hopefully.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: You know, the work that your organization
[00:22:29] Speaker A: does with peer visits, support group, mentorship, virtual meetings that you talked about. Are there some common or kind of overarching messages that you're hearing regularly?
What are our problems?
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the, the most, the biggest thing that comes up, especially with brand new amputees, is the impact that it has. It's not just a physical impact. Right. That is a big thing that you're grieving over, that you've a body part, but it's also spiritual and, and emotional. Right.
I don't know how many times I prayed to God and said, you know, just save me, like, you know, make me walk again, you know, and, and started to, you know, apply my faith and stuff in that. But then there's also the, the emotional piece where it's the, you know, the mental health, the stuff that goes around your head, right. It's like you go into a spiral. You go back to back, you know, to your room or at home here, and you just kind of go on a spiral going, I'll never walk again. I won't be able to do this. I've lost friends.
And that spiral just gets darker and darker if you don't, if you don't climb your way out of it. So I find, like a lot of people that I'm talking to, that's one of the key things that I, that I have to talk to them about is, is their mental health.
And, you know, we usually, we don't give advice for that. What we do is encourage them to get to a counselor or, you know, a psychiatrist of some sort, talk to their friends or whatever it might be to get it off, you know, kind of get it out of their mind. And then we, we try to get them to do things like meditate, go for walks, you know, do some things that you used to like to do if you can, even if that's small things like going for a coffee with somebody, a friend at a donut shop or a coffee shop. Right. Just keep moving forward and keep working towards, you know, a positive outcome is what we try to do with everybody.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah, good approach. I mean, with Thrive magazine, we're very careful not to cross the line of medical advice, although so many of us have so much experience.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: You know, in the medical world, but we do lean heavily into that mindfulness and physical activity. And, you know, those, those I joke,
[00:24:52] Speaker B: I joke with my nurses at dialysis that, you know, they'll, they'll try to do something and I say, do you want me to take over? Like, I know, I know how to do that?
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. My prosthetist loves it when I'm telling them what to do.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Good thing we're friends, that's for sure.
How about some of the maybe best advice that you got as an amputee? Now you're giving it and providing it and sourcing it and referring it and that. That's terrific. But thinking back, what did you need to hear?
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Well, there's. There's not one thing, Jeff, or person.
I'll tell you a couple stories, though. When I lost my first leg, I was very depressed down and. And didn't know what my life was going to look like with no legs and income. My doctor, who's wonderful and she.
From the rehab center, she traveled from the rehab center all the way over to the hospital, which is a fair distance in Toronto, just to come and see me and see how I was doing. And when she saw me and she could tell that I was a little bit down, she shook her head and said, what are you doing? What's wrong with you? I'm going to get you to walk again.
And I'll tell you, that was a milestone for me. It was a turning point for me. I was like, if this doctor believes that she can make me walk again, then why am I sitting here moping, you know?
So that was one.
The other one is I shared a room with this guy named Eberton and he would sing all the time, and, you know, he was always happy and he just lost his leg. And I'm like, how does he do that? Right?
And I asked him one day and he said, kevin, what choice do I have?
And I thought, he's right, you know, like, what choice do we have? We just have to keep pushing forward. Right.
You know, and then the third one was my wife. My wife said, you know, I've got you. I'm here to support you in any, any way, and let's get through this together. And those. Those are, you know, some of the milestones that I had or the, you know, the turning points to say, just if everybody believes in me, then why am. Why am I not believing in myself? Yeah.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: What a great message, that belief.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: To build your confidence back and believe in yourself. Right. And I like what you said about choice, too. We do have a choice. It's. It's which. Which path we want to take.
[00:27:26] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: You said E.
That gentleman's name.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really. What a great, really nice family. His wife would come in and the kids would come in, the small kids. I. I'd Go out and buy toys for them and they'd play in the hospital room with us. And yeah, I got really close with Everton. He's a really got nice man. Nice guy. Yeah.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: That's terrific. Yeah. I bet you meet a lot of nice folks in oh yeah community that are looking for that connection.
Right. And and appreciative of it.
Before we wrap up, Kevin, I want to ask you what your team's sort of long game vision is for for limb loss connection. What, what's the long term vision A for your organization but I think by association for the amputee community in general in Canada.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Well, you know, like I say it goes back to what I was saying about connectivity. Right. We just want everybody to connect.
We want to be able to like put standards into the way people deliver support and their support groups.
We want to expand that.
So we're, we're doing a lot of the support stuff, the virtual support, the peer support. We have all kinds of resources on our website like video, how to videos and frequently asked questions. We're going to continue to build on all of that but long term and what we're doing right now, in fact we're starting to do this is to you know, kind of spread a spider web out to all the services that are available.
So we recently just connected with a guy that does yoga for amputees.
Well why not come into the fold of limb loss and let's all work together on that. We can't do, you know, yoga for amputees. We need somebody to do that with us. Right. So we'll build partnerships with them.
You know another one is we have an amputee that teaches golfing to amputees. And so we're connecting with them and bringing them into the fold of limb loss.
So it's not about us, it's more about we offer what we offer but we want to be able to also connect with the broader services that are out there and bring them all into one hub.
If you look at our website, the way I've designed it is if you click on Canada and then Ontario you'll see all the rehab centers in Ontario. If you click on Canada and you know adaptive sports, you'll see all the adaptive sports in, in Ontario. I'd like to get it down to the city level to be honest with you. And the same thing with the states. You click on the states and you go United States and Texas, you'll get a list of things there that are specific to those regions. Right.
So we're trying to organize Things where, you know, everything's easy to find and, and, and locate so that you're not sitting at the computer googling, trying to find, you know, how do I buy a wheelchair? Well, here's, here's, here's some resources on what to look for. Right. Things like that. So longer term, picture, we're going to continue to build out resources like that, but we're also going to, going to be connecting and bringing in partners a lot.
Yeah.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: It is a fragmented community that, I mean, the disability community in general, I've learned in my years in this sector is.
Yeah, so many pockets. But it sounds like you're, you're building a hub for all the spokes to plug into. That's pretty cool.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other thing we're working on is we're working with the rehab centers and the hospitals as well.
So we've developed a kit with Amputee Coalition of Canada. We've been doing some work with them.
We developed a kit where we can drop it off to a bedside. So when a person comes into the hospital, they're brand new, they meet their team hopefully and they go through, you know, what each member of the team does and they leave them a package with a binder of resources that they can get started, you know, and they can start to read those things from that time on because the sooner you get to somebody, the less they're going to have a mental, you know, issue down the road or, you know, sadness or whatever. We got to get to them early so that they're optimistic and, and stay positive of what the outlook. Yes, you can do it. You can do anything.
There's nothing that you can't do as an amputee.
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Well, like you, like you said, what you were looking for originally is that hope.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: And, and when you don't have that and it's all uncertainty and all mystery.
Yeah, that, that's not, not good for the, the psyche at all. So, yeah, terrific stuff.
Congratulations on the great work and yeah.
Yeah, wide armed. Welcome to limb loss Connection to the community for sure. How do people, how can they contact you if they need to?
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, made it easy. Limblossconnection.com it's all one word. One, you know, word. No spaces, no underscores or anything like that. Limblossconnection.com if they want to reach out to me directly, it's easy Enough. It's Kevin Im lossconnection.com and there are two ways to get a hold of us or you can just go to the website There's a contact form there that you can submit. There's a form for one on one peer support. If you submit that, we'll arrange a peer support visitor. There's, you know, forms for joining virtual, virtual support sessions.
So it's all there, whatever you want to do. You just enter the data in and then you, it's all automated. You get links or you get a phone call or whatever it might be that you need, need to connect and we're pretty, pretty immediate. Like we'll get back to you within.
If it's not hours, it's within the day or two.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: All right. Wow. Yeah, that's impressive.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Wonderful. And good luck with your event in, in April in association with Limb Loss and Limb Difference Awareness Month on the day on the 25th in Toronto underneath.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Yeah, we didn't, we didn't really talk about that really, did we?
We're lighting up the CN Tower orange for limb loss and limb difference. That's the color for, for recognizing us amputees. We have a band coming into play, like an acoustic band. We have keynote speaker. The guy that's speaking, it is. His name is John Carnes and he's referred to as the mountain man.
He has climbed Mount Everest and two other mountains and he's now training to swim, swim from Paris over to the UK and he, he's, he lost both legs and one arm to an accident at work with, with the railway.
So pretty impressive of what he can do. Right? So there. And then there's other things. We have a comedian that's going to be there, that's an amputee and lots of, lots of stories about amputees and it's, it's a great way to get to know everybody in Toronto and mingle and connect.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Well, it sounds like the first installation of that conference that you're envisioning and yeah, just a reminder to everybody, it is a national organization. Kevin is, is based in, in Toronto and building the network outward from there. But regardless, right across the country.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Anybody, anyone can join. Yeah, right.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Kevin, thank you so much. So informative and such a great asset for our community. We'll see what, what we look like in five years with.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Jeff, I really enjoyed it. It was great have being on the show.
Yeah, I wish you all the best too.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Terrific. Thank you.
So with that this has been life and limb. Thanks for listening.
You can read about others who are thriving with limb loss or limb difference and plenty more at Thrive Mag Ca and you'll find our previous podcast episodes there too. Until next time. Live well, everyone.
