Friday came around—two days after my Wednesday surgery—and it was time for my first bandage change. The doctor came in with an assistant who didn’t speak any English. The doctor’s English was very, very broken.

“Okay, we change,” he said.

I was at the tail end of my pain medication cycle and asked, “Can I get pain meds first? This is not going to be good.”

“No, no time.”

“Okay, then I’ll just wait and get it after, I suppose.”

This doctor was definitely there to do a job—change the bandages—and that was it. He didn’t care much about how much it hurt me. I think he was more the “rip it off like a band-aid” approach, just get it done.

This first bandage change was an excruciatingly painful experience.

They started with the right foot, which was in this cardboard cast-type thing. I had ace bandages wrapped around my leg inside the cast. As they unwrapped it, they kept flip-flopping and rotating my leg—left and right, left and right. Every time it rotated, it was absolutely killing me.

Then they got to the gauze bandages from where they’d made the incisions. This was my first time actually seeing the incisions. A lot of everything had stuck—not just normal adhesion, but dried blood and everything stuck to the gauze. Wherever it stuck, he’d just pour some saline, dump and pull, dump and pull. A lot of stuff ended up reopening and oozing because he was pulling scabs off.

I was pretty well white-knuckling the bed rails with tears streaming down my face. He kept saying, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry,” while just pulling and tugging to get everything off.

Then he went to clean between the stitches. Oh my gosh, everything was so sensitive. Every time he touched between the stitches to try to clean stuff out, it hurt so bad. There was dried blood, iodine wash—all that leftover stuff. He went over everything a couple times with cleaner, using cotton and gauze to go through and clean between stitches and staples. It would catch on bits and pull, and fresh blood would ooze.

It was a very painful experience, but I did get to see the damage. I had stitches on my inside right ankle and what looked like stitches on the outside—come to find out they were staples. I didn’t get to look really closely because they had me lying down flat, and I was concentrating more on trying to get through the pain of it all. I didn’t get any pictures the first time, but I did get to see that I had two incisions on my right ankle.

Then they cleaned it back up, put it back in the little cast, and ace-bandaged everything back together.

Next came the left foot with all the erector set pieces. They had gauze wrapped around each pin. At this point, all the holes where the spikes came out of my ankle were pretty oozy with that watery red, dark red stuff. That had oozed and dried, oozed and dried, so all that was stuck to my skin.

Again, they were pouring saline to try to disconnect everything and get it unwrapped from the metal and skin. I was surprised to see, once they opened that up, that it was actually pretty clean. The metal just goes right through the skin, and it looked clean once the stuck stuff was off.

But I was surprised at the size of the cut on my left ankle. The fracture went basically from my outer ankle all the way around to about two inches behind my left inner ankle—a pretty big gap in the fracture. I could see how the doctor had stitched it; it almost looked like triple stitches, an inch-long band of stitches to pull that skin together. It was multiple rows to get it closed. I’m like, “Wow, I look like Frankenstein put back together.”

Those stitches were very painful. They were oozing a lot and stuck to a lot of the gauze.

I was like, “Okay, this guy really doesn’t give a shit how much he’s hurting me. He’s just here to change bandages and be done.”

The whole thing probably took about an hour. When they got me all wrapped back up, he said, “Okay, c’est bon?”

“Yeah, good. You’re done. Stop touching me. Let me just lay here in pain and recover.”

The nurse came in after, and I was still gripping the bed rails, trying to breathe, with tears still streaming. “No more crying. It’s done. It’s good. No more hurt.”

“No, it hurts a lot.”

“Okay.” He brought me one little pill—I think it was like a Tylenol—to take the edge off.

It took a while to recover from the pain of that bandage change. They had to come change the sheets after because there was enough saline and other fluids that had leaked out during the process. So it was a lot of movement, a lot of jostling during that time.

Feels like a good time for a nap…