Two weeks ago my skin graft was an 8 out of 10. I was riding high. My ankle had a B+. I was ready to frame the results and put them on the fridge next to the misquoted Ghostbusters line.

Now it’s a 5.

My ankle’s GPA is in freefall and I don’t even know what it did over spring break.

For those keeping score at home — and at this point I assume someone somewhere has a spreadsheet — the skin graft is still there. It hasn’t failed. It’s just… underperforming. Which is a word I never thought I’d use to describe skin but here we are in month five of the derelict ankle saga and I have used a lot of words I never thought I’d use. “Bovine collagen scaffold” was not in my vocabulary a year ago. Neither was “wound vac as a third pet.” Language evolves when your body decides to become a long-running medical drama.

The silver lining — and I am scraping the bottom of the silver lining barrel at this point, there is almost no silver left, we are down to the aluminum lining — is that the wound vac is off. For now. Those two words are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. “For now” is the unofficial motto of this entire ankle journey. Everything is “for now.” The graft is holding for now. The wound is healing for now. I am emotionally stable for now.

Being without the wound vac is strange. I’d gotten so used to it that its absence feels wrong. Like when you take off a heavy backpack and your body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I can walk without the boot. I can wear normal pants. I can sleep without rearranging myself around a small medical robot that exists only to make sleep impossible. These are things I should be celebrating and I am, mostly, but there’s this voice in the back of my head that keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which is ironic because I can barely wear shoes.

I have an appointment in a week. The graft could be fine. The graft could also fail, which would mean more surgery. Another round. Another reset. Another starting line when I thought I could see the finish.

I told the doctor at our last visit that it is emotionally important that this is over soon.

I don’t usually say stuff like that to doctors. I’m usually the “whatever you think is best” patient. The easygoing one. The one who makes jokes about his ankle being derelict and names his wound vac and finds the humor in hyperbaric chambers. But I’m running out of jokes. Not completely — I’ll always have jokes — but the reserves are lower than they’ve been. The tank that powers the “it’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine” engine is not full.

It has gotten harder to stay positive. I want to be clear about that because I think there’s a version of this blog where I only share the funny parts and the wins and the 8-out-of-10 moments. But the truth is that going from an 8 to a 5 in two weeks is demoralizing in a way that’s hard to describe. You build up this fragile little scaffolding of hope — which, ironically, is exactly what they did to my ankle with the Integra — and then someone comes along and tells you the scaffolding is only holding at 50% and you might need to start over.

I’m not starting over yet. The graft hasn’t failed. The appointment is in a week. There are possible outcomes here that don’t involve more surgery and I’m trying to focus on those.

Sarah has been, as always, impossibly supportive. I don’t know how she does it. I genuinely don’t. Five months of wound care and doctor visits and my increasingly fragile emotional state and she just keeps showing up. She keeps driving me to appointments and asking the right questions and being steady when I can’t be. If my ankle is a 5 out of 10, Sarah is operating at about a 47.

So here we are. Wound vac free. Walking on my own feet. Graft at a 5 and holding. Appointment in a week. Possibility of more surgery on the table but not confirmed. Emotionally somewhere between cautiously hopeful and deeply tired.

I’ll update when I know more. For now — and there’s that phrase again — I’m just trying to get through the week without spiraling.

Stay healthy out there. And if your body is cooperating today, don’t take it for granted. That cooperation is a gift and it can be revoked at any time without notice.