I have never in my life wanted to be rated on a scale of one to ten. Not my cooking, not my juggling, not my personality — nothing. But when a doctor looks at your skin graft and says “I’d give that an eight out of ten,” suddenly you’re an Olympic judge’s favorite and you want to call your mom.

Eight out of ten. My ankle got a B+.

For those of you just tuning in — and honestly at this point the Derelict Ankle Saga has more episodes than Grey’s Anatomy — here’s where we are. October 2025: ligament surgery. Then infection, hospital stay, hyperbaric oxygen chamber (still magical), wound that wouldn’t close, Integra application in January (that’s the bovine collagen and shark cartilage stuff, because apparently my ankle needed to be part cow and part shark before it could be part human again), and then the skin graft got bumped up because the Integra was an overachiever.

And now? The graft took. Eight. Out. Of. Ten.

I asked what a ten looks like and the doctor kind of shrugged in a way that made me think tens are theoretical. Like a perfect game in bowling. You hear about them but you’ve never actually seen one. So an eight feels pretty damn good.

The catch — because there’s always a catch with this ankle — is that I’ve still got the wound vac until next week. If you’ve never had a wound vac, imagine a very small, very annoying robot vacuum strapped to your body that exists solely to make sure you can’t sleep comfortably or wear normal pants. It’s fine. I’m fine. Sarah and I are both fine. We’ve been living with this thing for months now and at this point it’s basically a third pet. Less cute than Ramona, more demanding than Jeff.

But next week it comes off. Hopefully. If this weekend goes well and the healing continues. I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself because this ankle has taught me that optimism is a trap it likes to spring on me when I’m not looking. Every time I think we’re turning a corner, the corner turns out to be one of those M.C. Escher staircases.

But also? We’re so close. Like, genuinely close. Closer than we’ve been since October. The wound is healing. The graft is grafting. The cow-shark-human hybrid that is my ankle is doing its thing.

Sarah, as always, has been the absolute MVP of this entire saga. I don’t know what the scoring system is for spouses who deal with wound vacs and doctor appointments and the emotional rollercoaster of watching someone’s ankle slowly decide to cooperate, but she’s a ten out of ten. No theoretical ceiling needed.

So here we are. Eight out of ten. Wound vac until next week. Cautiously, carefully, quietly optimistic.

Stay grafted, stay hydrated, and stay safe.