How to Pack a Wound

The memory comes in flashes. Urgent care, wedding reception, hospital room.

It started as a little cut, a bump on my upper left thigh, ordinary and unremarkable. Until it wasn’t. Over the course of a week, it had taken a new shape—mandarin orange—followed by two more bumps, hot and hellbent on having their say.

Something was rising from within, something deeper than I could see, but my body already knew. (The body always knows.)

Maybe it got infected at the gym, or on the plane. Maybe it had always been there, a slow-moving train towards disaster. “Who knows, really,” the surgeon shrugged, as I bobbed in and out of a morphine haze. “But if we don’t cut the infection out now, she could lose her leg.”

It’s not lost on me how lucky I am. What if my stepmom hadn’t sounded the alarm? What if a doctor hadn’t been a wedding guest? What if there wasn’t an ER nearby, and we had waited a day, an hour, minutes later?

“There will be scars,” the surgeon informed the room. “Shame—a beautiful girl.” I woke up the morning after and cried.

The surgery left three holes, the biggest the size of a silver dollar. The wounds were deep. So deep, it took a month and multiple seasons of Law & Order: SVU to recover in my dad’s guest bedroom.

The antibiotics and cells did their good work, but some wounds cannot heal with medicine alone. They must be cleaned from the inside out. They must be packed.

Twice daily, my dad would come in with sterile gloves and I would brace myself for an agonizing 30 seconds in which he’d pack the silver dollar wound. What if I hadn’t been raised by a man who knows love is a verb?

I still cringe thinking about it—sharp sting, slow pull. He was swift, but there is no way to endure such a thing without pain. He’d pull gauze out of the open hole with tweezers, clean the area with a saline-soaked cue tip, and carefully insert new gauze inside. It had to be done right, or the wound would close too soon, trapping infection beneath the surface. We did this over and over, until the hole closed and there was nothing left but scar tissue.

I hopped around on one leg for a while, then walked, then ran. My left-side Warrior III still wobbles, but I make do. It was excruciating. I was eager to put it behind me. Like so many things in life, the appreciation came later. I didn’t thank my suffering until I was on the other side of it. 

What I couldn’t have known at the time was the lesson unfolding. This experience quite literally prepared me to pack the internal wounds I had yet to face. It showed me the process that would later occur on much deeper levels—for some wounds are far too deep to ignore. They will not fade if left untreated.

In fact, they will grow louder, bigger. They will throw you into the lion’s den, and say “good luck with that.” They will shake you awake until you have no choice but to face it. And when you do, you must face it full-on: you must go into the pain and stare it in the eye. You must clean it out as many times as it takes.

And so, if there’s something in you that aches, something left open and raw, I urge you to honor it. I urge you to sit with it and pack it slowly, carefully.

Rest. Be patient with yourself. Find those you can lean on. And be utterly ruthless in the pursuit of your own freedom.

Healing is not passive. It requires accountability and deep discomfort. You cannot ignore a wound and expect it to close on its own. You must tend to it—even when your ego says it will never end. And when it finally does, I hope you see the truth it has been leading you to all along: it has always & will always be you.

What if I had stayed in New York that weekend? What if the infection kept spreading? What if? I could spend my whole life looping on things outside of my control, fixated on the ways I have been wounded without warning.

But if my healing journey has taught me anything, it’s that the only person coming to save me is me. It has shown me I can pack any wound, face any despair, and I will make it through. I am the key to my own liberation. And while I know there are still more doors for me to walk through, the ones I have opened thus far have fundamentally changed me.

On the other side of trauma is a sight so beautiful, you must see it to believe. I'm talking unfathomable joy—a flowing well of creative wonder. Trust me. Or don't. But it's the realest thing I've ever known.

But first, you must choose to stay. You must dare to look. You must roll up your sleeves and pack the wound.