operation

It was like an episode of the walking dead. There was blood all over the crusty wall with chipped blue paint and there was only a desk lamp in the room for the doctor to operate with. We were at the policlinica in the countryside of the Dominican Republic. I was holding on tight to a distant cousin that I barely knew as the doctor inspected my wounds.

 The room was full of unfamiliar faces that stood behind the lamp making it hard to recognize them. The windows were all open letting in critters to the room and moths near the lamp. The doctor screamed at everyone to leave the room when I noticed my mother in the crowd. I screamed for her as the room cleared out and she made her way to me. I expected her to yell at me for being to stupid and getting on that 4x4, but she just held my hand and told me she loved me as she wiped the dirt from my face with a damp cloth.

The doctor asked if it was ok if she cut off my legging and I jokingly said that they weren’t even mine. There was now blood all over my mother’s shirt as the doctor poured saline all over my knee. I pulled my mothers face closer to mine to block the view of my legs. I felt the doctor scrub my knee and pull out rocks from it. The pain was blinding. I couldn’t breath.

I could hear all of my family praying outside the door in Spanish while the doctor said, “vamos a haces puntos.” I didn’t know what puntos meant but before I could ask I felt a poke and my knee went numb. I finally realized that puntos meant stiches. Even with the anesthesia I could feel a wave of pain come a go on my leg.

  As she made her way to my clean my foot that was also gushing blood I tried to focus on my breathing. I thought about how long it took for me to finally clear up the scars on legs from previous accidents. I thought about how all of this could have been avoided if I had just stayed at my grand fathers house. But what worried me the most was the horror stories that I’ve heard in the past about people going to hospitals in foreign countries. I didn’t know if the needle was sterilized and if the lady who was stitching me up was a real doctor.

After all the crying the doctor was finally done. I couldn’t feel my legs at all. She said that when I wake up the next day that the pain is going to be unbearable. Everyone thought that I had started crying again but I was really laughing.

Sometimes you need to find something to laugh at in dark times like these or else you’re going to end up feeling a lot worse then you really are.