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‘I would wake up … feeling like I’m going to die’: David Ortiz speaks after shooting

It was painless at first, the bullet that ripped through David Ortiz’s torso and lodged in his friend’s leg.

“I felt a burning sensation,’’ Ortiz told the Globe in his first public comments to an English language publication since he was shot June 9 in his native Dominican Republic. “I felt weird, like not myself, as I went down.’’

The former Red Sox great had been sipping scotch with seven or eight friends at a familiar hangout, the trendy Dial Bar and Lounge in Santo Domingo, and was chatting with a singer known as Secreto when a gunman rushed his front row table at the bar’s outdoor patio and fired a single bullet from close range into his back.