Larissa Roy 2

Bleeding

Apparently, asking for the morbid details is frowned upon, or so one can quickly gather from the odd looks. The conversation started easily enough, wondering where that fantastic scar stretching from the left eyebrow halfway down a friend’s cheek in one perfectly curved line happened to get there. What had caused the scar has plenty of back story—a stupid dare followed by one whopping mistake and a more vicious nature of trees than once believed, naturally when Mom and Dad weren’t home to take the teller to the emergency room. The table erupts in laughter at the ridiculous nature of another story, many new voices ready to jump in and display their own battle scar. I have scars of my own but instead I eagerly ask the current narrator what the doctor said and did. It’s usually a clipped answer—he put in a cast and sent me home—or something more geared to the doctor’s reaction—he rolled his eyes at me or started laughing—before the conversation veers off to someone else’s story, more ridiculous and hilarious than the last (and further explaining why helmets are generally important in some sports or otherwise why few people have tried to travel down that particular hill in a wagon). I’ll ask what sort of surgery it took and what muscles were torn and get an answer such as stomach surgery or the tendon in my knee. I’ve seen my share of hospitals and I have politely and routinely asked what the doctor is doing and why, remembering phrases such as edema and intramedullary canal. Not everyone shares this curiosity.

Scar stories are fine to discuss in the right company but linger too long on the details and the audience is, for all purposes, grossed out. I’d ask my mother, a nurse, at dinner what happened at work that day and hear about the stent put in an artery or that she was assisting in general surgery where she touched a lung or the more oddly eventful day involving projectile vomit; my father and my brothers were not quite so appreciative. There’s usually a good story or two to tell; one adage in particular that she reassures me is that it’s the big tough guys who pass out at the sight of blood. Take my uncle, for example, an engineer, 6’2” and hairy. A friend broke his wrist one day and my uncle went with him to the ER; when the doctors were “moving the bones around like a joystick,” my uncle could feel something was wrong. He left the room with as much dignity as possible only to pass out between the automatic sliding doors which, in true comedic style, tried to close and open on his prone body. Why this trend falls to the biker-types, I cannot be certain. Still, while taking microbiology, it was soon understood that most of the people there would probably rather not talk about necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria) or see the accompanying pictures at the dinner table. They roll their eyes and make comments along the lines of “bio major” while pushing the conversation on to different subjects. The other tables that overhear send the occasional odd look when I glance up.

Time and again, blood is left to those labeled as “morbid.” Only a deathly depressing person or a doctor or nurse would mention blood. There are many stigmas and connotations that attach themselves to the word. Since blood is a somewhat taboo subject, it holds a mystery; when faced with blood directly, danger is an overwhelming emotion. Angsty-Emo songs speak of death and bleeding and the occasional masterpiece of pop sneaks in lyrics about the pounding love sending fire along his veins. For females, blood can mean a certain monthly visitor and all the various meanings therein. For a few, blood is indicative of a well-spent afternoon clambering about the neighborhood and skinning the occasional knee, though grass stains would mark the day just as well. The vampire-obsessed still hold its mystic quality (ironically seeing it as necessary for life). Blood can be part of a mystic voodoo ceremony where the generic characters from Generic Show were sent careening from their private jet onto a supposedly deserted island in the Pacific where cannibals wait with spears and sharpened teeth for the season finale. It’s easiest to ignore blood and have the heroes scar-less three minutes later. For most, however, blood falls back to disease and contagion; if someone starts bleeding, the first reaction is to back away and treat the bleeder delicately, staying away from the bleeding site as much as possible—those with a nursing instinct or training might jump in to apply pressure if the wound is bad enough. All the same, disease sends the mind down pathways to either third world countries or hospitals.

Few people find the hospital a happy place to be, surrounded by other sick people and undoubtedly the new roommate has a condition so terrible that he claims all the priority to whine. When a stereotypically burly nurse insists that the patient walk down the hallway (certainly an attempt at torture rather than anything beneficial), the sterile white is far from homey. The only rooms with color are part of pediatrics but a blue border on a empty wall is an improvement over clowns tumbling over one another with maniacal expressions, unless the patient is lucky enough to be admitted to a room with goofy cartoon animals instead. Beeps and random snippets of conversation between nurses or a woman reading to whoever was covered in bandages or the occasional intercom message playing “Rock-a-bye Baby” to announce a new life and an eventual new source of income for the hospital, all buzz through the eerie hallways. Someone else is dragging around his own new friend, Mr. IV-pole, and trying desperately to hold the back of the blue gown, speckled in tiny flowers, together and make the squeaking wheels wobble in the right direction.

The perception fails us. Blood is sickness and death and thinking too much on sickness and death is seen as a sickness in itself. However, it’s simply not practical to put all such thought aside; taking care of family plots and deciding whether to be incased in a mausoleum or an urn. Our bodies were simply not meant to last forever. Learning about one’s own health does not seem like such an extraordinary task. Still, we rely on doctors, called up in the wee hours of the night to answer questions (placing as much jargon aside as possible) so that the patient can listen to his advice and be well. Doctors are counted on to know the answers and tell us what’s wrong so we don’t have to spend hours studying and critiquing our own signs and symptoms (a very difficult process if the patient is, say, suffering delusions or impaired vision). Being human, doctors are fallible and he or she had to start in the same place, chucked into high school biology. In many cases, it falls back mostly to fear and the psychological need to place the blame. Were the patient to thoroughly research, excuses of ignorance no longer hold any standing with blame and guilt marking a new place to settle with a strong, dead weight; the doctor cannot be blamed when there is actually nothing he could do, as incredibly frustrating as the scenario of trial and error (with all of the terrible waiting in between) can be. Even a small grounding of information can grow into a larger, complex world. The athlete looking for an extra edge might be sitting idly in biology and take a basic concept about red blood cells, that they carry oxygen. Knowing that oxygen is essential for physical activity (and life), perhaps he wonders about a boost, inducing the body to produce more red blood cells with drugs or skipping the energy needed to produce one’s own cells, manages to wrangle a transfusion. New tests at major events for these creative cheaters involve searching for minor antigens. However, should the cheater skip class on a different crucial day, issues such as blood type might not end up in his notes. No one else in the world shares your DNA (excluding identical twins) but millions of people share your blood type, more depending on your blood type and the region, as some countries have more of one sort than another.

Most don’t take much time to consider how much is happening on the cellular level—to fully comprehend the complexity in one cell (let alone one body) is somewhere between mind-numbing and mind-exploding. However, many are faced with drastic or ongoing circumstances with a transfusion, as a result of a nasty traffic accident or a disease that eats at tissues until they break and bleed. This network of vessels is far more efficient than the postal service could ever boast and often taken for granted unless it is brought to our attention by somehow becoming blatantly obvious, i.e. a paper cut, accidental run-in with a particularly vengeful piece of furniture, or rampant chainsaw psychos. But from a biological standpoint, blood is fascinating, complex, and certainly pertinent in good health. In one drop of blood, there are about fifty two million red blood cells, four hundred thousand neutrophils (these are leukocytes or white blood cells and part of the immune response, destroying invaders along with themselves), two hundred and fifty thousand B and T cells (again, important for immune response), forty thousand macrophages (which essentially eat the invaders and report on them), along with plasma and platelets. All in a single drop of blood.

Emaciated by whatever reason, factors such as blood type become vital lest the body attack the donated materials, organs or blood. Blood is ordinarily categorized as positive or negative then as either A, B, AB, or O. There are a few theories surrounding why mankind has developed different types, but the most logical answer for the purposes here rests in that it is another layer of protection from our marvelous immune system. O+ is the most common blood type, convenient for its illustrious status as universal donor, with A+ behind it. AB as the rarest, particularly negative, because of how blood types are inherited (but this is a point for another day). These letters refer to carbohydrate chains that form antigens that identify the cells. Essentially, these antigens are like a photo ID resting on the outside of various cells, in this case red blood cells. Individuals with type A blood have A antigen sites, “A” being more or less just a name for that specific marker. People with B blood form B antigens, and those with AB have both sorts on the same red blood cell. Type O individuals have neither one of these markers. NK cells, or natural killer cells, wander around the body, so to say, looking for “missing self.” In other words, these cells are like the passport checkers at the airport, making sure that only those with the proper passports and citizenship are allowed in (those with the same antigens as the rest of the body) and detaining those without citizenship to Ellis Island (based on whether they have the wrong antigens and, with a darker twist, destroying them rather than shipping them back to the former country). These and other cells are part of the immune system’s stellar response to regulating the body’s health—the immune system kills about ten thousand cancer cells daily.

Unfortunately, the immune system is the subject of a lot of aggression for “the one that got away” and, in the case of allergies and poor reactions to blood transfusions, simply for trying to do its job. If person number one has type A, they produce antibodies to bind to the B antigens in an effort to mark them for destruction and vice versa. Should a random accident victim—say type A—need a transfusion and through a lax in hospital policy they are given the wrong blood type—say type B—the immune system will recognize something is amiss, and through the lysis of the donated blood, no matter how desperately it is needed, the recipient soon feels symptoms of chills, fever, shock, and kidney malfunctions. AB is everybody’s friend and produces no antibodies against A or B, as these would ultimately do more harm than good; generally the body works better if it doesn’t naturally produce antibodies that attack itself. This type is known as the universal recipient because the receiver of this type is least likely to reject the donation since it would not recognize A or B as foreign or note that O was wrong. Type O is a sneaky undercover agent and simply has no distinguishing characteristics, or rather antigen markers, to attack. It’s known as the universal donor because it is least likely to be rejected in situations when the blood type is unknown, such as emergency hospital procedures. The Rhesus (Rh) factor, where the + or – comes from, is much more common to be positive than negative, as if blood wasn’t picky enough. This matter comes up occasionally with pregnant women, when the mother and child have different Rh factors. The mother’s immune system does not recognize the fetus as part of itself and takes subsequent action against what it “thinks” is a parasite, with any personal views of children aside. There are current therapies to deal with the dilemma.

For all the issues surrounding it, blood itself is not likely to up and leave on all of mankind—having proven useful in evolution thus far and not having a mind to perceive any ingratitude—but health does have a habit of fluctuating through actions of our own or otherwise (“was that chicken supposed to be pink?”). All the same, are we, as heartless as it is to say this, damning ourselves by keeping weaker genes floating around, like dead bugs, hair, and algae, in our pristine, chlorinated gene pool? Timmy doesn’t need a transfusion because he really should have stopped that semi full of chickens from running that red light and slamming into his bicycle; obviously since he cannot watch where he is going, we don’t want his “stupid genes” to infect our future. Maybe it would just be best to let young Wendy be a sacrifice instead of chancing her diabetes to be spread to another generation. It’s Jenny’s fault she was raped and her attacker didn’t use a condom. Passing on the best genes, in whichever context they are taken, can lead to a childish blame game; what is “best” can falls to subjectivity. Eugenics—selective breeding with aims for specific traits within the human population—is not typically a favored idea, especially when this could swiftly pass from cruel to science fiction, but it’s best for mankind in the evolutionary scale.

There are still some factors to consider in that some traits may have effects that we are unaware of until they are eradicated. Take the quintessential example of sickle cell anemia—where red blood cells are shaped more like a crescent than a full moon—as a case of what’s called the heterozygote advantage, evidence encouraging why some harmful genes still float around. This disease is caused by having two recessive genes (homozygous, having the same) with those who have either one dominant and one recessive (heterozygous, having different) or two dominant genes (homozygous) not with sickle cell anemia. However, the heterozygous individual has immunity to malaria that the homozygous dominant individual lacks and without the adverse effects of sickle cell anemia of the homozygous recessive. Destroying this gene could prove quite detrimental and would involve killing off many healthy individuals; two healthy heterozygotes could still produce progeny with sickle cell anemia. Should carriers of the disease be eradicated as well as those showing signs of the disease? To deliver the death sentence is easier when it applies to nameless masses, but many healthy individuals carry all sorts of genes that combine in just the wrong manner have severe consequences; the more genetics are considered, it truly is a miracle to form one healthy baby. With many diseases strained from our gene pool, something new would inevitably rise up—bacteria has always been more clever and significantly faster at evolving than we are.

A different lunchtime conversation floats around the cafeteria when the American Red Cross is in town, discussing who will take an hour or two of his or her own time to donate. Some are sporting (or secretly flaunting) new tattoos or piercings and are relieved to be ineligible. Many have a disease or condition that renders his or her blood unusable. There remains a worse, more subtle infection that can affect everyone, commonly known as human apathy. This nervous disorder starts in the brain and works first to the hands, stopping them from reaching out, then eventually to the feet where the victim feels inclined to shake the dust off and take a comfortable seat. Certain religious sects place a high value on blood, finding no reason why it should leave the body when it seems to be quite content and functioning where it is. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, harken back to a verse in Leviticus but make an exception in some cases to a machine called the cell saver as it is on a closed system (the patients’ own cells are rinsed and returned). More just don’t have the time.

Perhaps today’s world lacks motivation to be altruistic. It’s a dog eat dog world. Gotta look out for number one. It’s all about me. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby. A man actually is an island. Many fall back to more reasons for not donating including fear of needles and a long trip to the donation centers. Yet despite all of this, there are those who give blood on a regular basis. Common reasons for donation include the sense of “because I’m healthy and I can,” the blood supply is always wanting, or the donor has seen someone benefit from transfusion. Trying to quantify this aspect is a tricky task. Any study surrounding donation will be subject to variance, since rationale for donation can still stem to many new reasons (from a martyr complex to trying to make the Red Cross leave them alone or the need for one more card in a stuffed wallet). It’s also possible that those who wouldn’t donate also would be those who wouldn’t respond to this study. Young blood donors are targeted specifically because they have the potential to donate for years to come, and once a pattern of donating is set perhaps it is hopefully less likely to stop. A general trend of a decline in blood donors, particularly young donors (between eighteen and thirty), has been sighted in many countries, including a study conducted in the Netherlands. Dutch students may or may not receive formal education concerning blood transfusion and donation yet those that do donate presumably form their opinions from the general moral attitude and societal influences overall. Has the social perception of blood donation slid so far out of favor to fall toward animosity?

To begin with, there is an innate sense that my blood belongs in my body. Who owns your blood? Obviously, you do, this concept of ownership evolving after blood along the evolutionary timeline. You were born with it, and it will continue to be yours until you lose it (not as easy to misplace as car keys, at least) or die. But we have little Timmy who was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps the neurologist should be paged so he can assess the latest case of human apathy. Timmy’s too young to have donated blood for himself (which some adults do before surgery) nor did anyone anticipate that he would need it so his family hopes that someone else has. I have money of my own but Timmy needs just a little to get through this rough patch in his life; in a week, interest will have made up the difference (the red blood cells have been replaced) and in another seven it’s not worth it to keep the receipt (since the iron count has returned to normal). Ownership of land is commonly up for dispute, ranging back from the first settlers who set foot on shore, much like shouting for “shotgun” before the other siblings could steal the prized seat. And the big brother can amble up and easily push little sister out of the way with a rough claim that it’s his turn; little sister can cry but if the new law does not recognize shouting “shotgun,” then her ownership is void. Should the government rule that blood is an open resource to everyone like a community well, where would those opposed to the bill stand? It seems like common sense but what precedents can be cited? From there, it would likely be unlawful to do anything that would taint the water supply; anyone who spreads HIV or Hepatitis or spends too much time in a foreign country where CJD (mad cow disease) has recently broken out or does not simply take care of his or her health could be punishable by law. Eugenics may be the least of our worries if every stuffy nose would mean jail time (there are probably better uses for our penal system). All the same, blood is a resource and just as claims for land or the front seat, it will be disputed.

Since the Bill of Rights does limit the tireless soldiers of the American Red Cross from veritable vampirism, with a rubber tourniquet and a needle instead of seduction and fangs, the question of filling the ever emptying blood banks rests highly in the hope of donation. Asking people to donate time or money has an instant reaction of a hesitant ‘um’ or at least a drop in enthusiasm that may not be visible so much as audible in the tone of voice. The word has a stigma. There is no monetary gain in donating unless karma and the black market are factored into this equation.

Donation takes time, which is far too valuable to be spent on things that are not immediately beneficial. Again, the neurology department bemoans that there is no definite cure for human apathy—regardless of how many lobotomies they perform and what experimental drugs they prescribe—and can only pray that its victims find his or her own way to escape its cold clutches. Making the issue personal is a difficult process when those who would donate blood never see or understand it being put into use. I could easily go on about how a blood transfusion saved my life in the middle of a flare up from Crohn’s disease (the inflammation of my small intestine meant that I didn’t retain nutrition let alone all of my blood), but chances are, you’ve heard it all before; I was already convinced, having donated several times prior to that whole mess. The only way to understand fully is to see someone you know in that situation, even if that someone is yourself.

There will, at this rate, ultimately fall a time of desperation, and desperate people are dangerous. The urban legends following the story of innocent folk lured and drugged to wake up missing an organ would turn into a frightening eventuality of real blood hustling. Organ donation lacks the stigma attached to blood donation, though the same diseases could and have been contracted through this sharing. Perhaps because organ transplants are not nearly as common as blood transfusions particularly because of the lack of availability, despite what Dr. Gregory House would have you believe. Organs, too, are easier to rename in ownership, hopefully the body accepts the new organ and it will stay there for years to come rather than the temporary help of skin or blood where the impression remains that someone else’s is blurring in with what’s mine. Dr. Frankenstein is not the only one in need of these temporary or not so temporary extra pieces that would otherwise rot away.
What causes the phenomena of the black market to where even eBay has rules specifically pertaining to the buying and selling of people or body parts? Quite simply, there is a recognition that the system is flawed. Goodwin mentions a particular case where a sixty-one year old state governor received not one but two organs (could have saved two lives, right there) after spending only a day on the wait list and the wake of outcry from the family members who have been waiting for weeks, months, and years for their own loved one to receive an organ. There is a bias and there is a shortage of organs, particularly now when each potential donor is screened and re-screened so as not to pass on any new diseases to the recipient (who will be under many drugs to suppress the immune system). Even if there wasn’t a shortage, there would ultimately be those who wait longer than others. So desperate people buy organs through shady connections that occur in dark alleyways with suitcases full of money and other movie clichés, never mind the viability of the organ and who it came from. Families have been brought under charges of child abuse when a second child is specifically bred to donate materials enough to save the first, where the child has no choice in the matter over Mom and Dad’s wishes. Desperate people are scary.

Panicking people are terrifying. Probably the most detrimental force to hit the rate of blood donations rests in the AIDS scare. That terrible bruise resting in the crook of the arm is far from fetching. If they hit an artery with the needle instead of a vein, some obese nurse will all but sit on the arm until it stops, such as happened to the principal of my high school. Some people are just going to keep needing blood and we’d rather not be enablers; one the plus side, a unit of blood is approximately a pound so an hour and a half guarantees that you lose weight. These are more of the excuses piled against donating but there is still a fear that perhaps I might get HIV from donation, leaving my veins vulnerable to a needle, regardless if it came out of sterile package. The truth of a matter is that there is a difference between donation and transfusion—receiving a donation is more dangerous than giving one.

When AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficieny Syndrome, for those unfamiliar) became a public matter, news networks had to be careful how they presented the issue; AIDS was soon labeled as a “gay disease.” Naturally, this led to all sorts of hysterics where many folk were convinced that giving the time of day to a homosexual meant a slow, whittling death of simple infection complicated by AIDS. The gay community was targeted and attacked by some but they were certainly not the only sufferers; they had the misfortune of being seen as carriers instead of victims. It would easily be a difficult position to run a news network, wondering how much to disclose to keep the public informed and how much to brush over to ensure a calm audience.

Discrimination is unfortunately likely to follow at one point in an AIDS individual sooner or later, regardless of how he or she happened to obtain the disease; hemophiliacs for example, those who have blood that doesn’t clot properly, had many victims or all ages who were infected with HIV and subsequently AIDS through a transfusion. Ideally, judgements would rely on facts, then individual conclusions, and subsequently taking action. But, try as one might, forcing information on a reluctant subject is something teachers have been struggling with for years. Action is difficult to instigate without the words “stubborn” and “pushy” making their way into the argument. Some stories become community events, some are private sufferings, others turn into mid-afternoon movie specials. One way or another, though, AIDS became the new leprosy.

This fear landed to blood. Science didn’t have an immediate answer as to how the virus spread so many avoided any possible contact, blaming gays and avoiding the ill with a hypochondriac’s fervor. When evidence was presented that verified that the disease could be spread by sex and blood, blood fell out of favor. With communities in fearful uproar, blood donation centers had to counteract the problem or watch as the bank shelves remained empty. I spoke with one of the members of the Red Cross blood drive who mentioned that the questionnaire for the potential donor has gone from four questions to over a hundred. Questions that have been added since I’ve been donating include issues such as CJD—Creuzfeldt-Jakob Disease, mad cow disease when it crosses the species border; specifically, a question or two pertaining to travel of specific countries since 1980. Blood centers promised that all donations would be screened before they had sure technology to do so as they do now. If a child stumbles on the playground, first aid states not to touch the blood if at all possible. Rubber gloves snapping into place with a flume of latex dust, perhaps another glove blown up and sketched with a hasty smiley face before becoming an awkward volleyball. Blood seems more like a disease or a carrier or even a poison rather than what keeps the body functioning.

Thus, the hemaphobes and germophobes have a basis for their fear. Before germs and microorganisms were accepted as the agents of disease in the scientific community, doctors didn’t even wash their hands; Semmelweis in 1847 had an insane idea one day that perhaps if the doctors would wash their hands after performing an autopsy instead of immediately running to the maternity ward, it might save a life or two. Really though—and real McCoy germophobes may wish to close there eyes, clamp their hands over their ears and make some sort of annoying noise to drown this out—it’s not worth it to be a germophobe; they are positively everywhere. A pound of microbiota on your skin, another three pounds in the gut, in fact we’re more non human than human when it comes to a cell ratio of what’s around us. No matter how much Lysol we use, there will always be some sort of bacterium, harmless (where it is) or otherwise. And really many of these microbes are beneficial. Yogurt packages mention live cultures which is generally lactobacillus and doctors will sometimes advise patients taking antibiotics to eat some yogurt to replace the dying microbes, lest anything worse come along and take its place. Bifidobacterium aside from being fun to say can be found in the digestive tract, aiding in digestion and fixating vitamin K. Yet though these are another species, not even animals or remotely close, they are still part of us. E. coli floating around in the gut and digesting food benefits just as much from a healthy host as we benefit from its presence. Staphylococcus aureus (Staph infections ring any bells?) rests on our skin and wards off other bacteria, quite content to live on our skin, only becoming a problem when trying to search out a new place to grow and propagate (i.e., past the skin). A transfusion is entirely foreign, and though its cells mingle well enough with our own, there is still a warning about incompatibility (and rightly so) that ends in completely discriminating against what has saved someone’s life. That blood belonged to someone else, but never to me. That blood becomes part of the recipient when the body accepts it. An organ is easily quantified, distinguished, and accepted, but the blood in indistinguishable upon mixing, still a nice, warm red with no immediate markers. A foreign substance is there but invisible. When the danger has passed, the recipient perhaps is grateful and ultimately forgets about foreign blood wandering around his or her own veins. Red blood cells are replaced fairly rapidly and soon enough, traces are gone. Does the new blood ever really become the recipients? This question depends highly on recipient. In backwards logic, when is donated blood no longer belonging to that person? When it has left the body, when it is sitting at the blood bank, or when it has been used? After a successful donation, the Red Cross nurses hand out sheets with a phone number and a code for one’s blood, should some particular reason why the blood is unusable happen to occur to the donator. The majority of donators, despite this possibility of power, probably hold that once the needle is withdrawn, the blood is no longer theirs and off to the property of the Red Cross until it is the property of someone else. Bacteria, like blood, are beneficial when kept in the proper balances, sometimes requiring augmentation. Phobias, as traumatic and real as they are, are defined as an irrational fear and this follows the same.

It’s not worth fearing blood. It’s a part of everyday life. Its connection with the spread of disease and particularly death is what makes it such a potentially frightening; a festering sludgeheap of all those tiny micro-terrorists whose only goal is to knock our bodies down. The fear of blood falls back to disease. Disease can thrive in a situation of fear. Take antibacterial hand soaps. For those that don’t know, these do nothing more than normal soap, maybe even less. Triclosan, the antibacterial part of antibacterial soap, has lost its potency. Most bacteria is immune to its effects; bacteria is more efficient at changing and evolving than we could ever fully fathom, establishing resistant strains to any antibiotic we can dish out in a matter of generations. From this base immunity, drugs that work in a similar manner are already vulnerable to resistance, especially with the widespread the use of antibacterial soap. Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, made worse by those who panic; those who stockpile antibiotics, such as the massive holdings of ciprofloxacin when anthrax scares marred the public conscious, are ultimately doing a huge disservice. Hindsight has shown the power of fear again and again; social propaganda functions on it. Part of what makes our own mortality such an uneasy matter to talk about is the lack of certainty. But just like any medical procedure, nothing is really certain; many unforeseen complications are resting quietly behind any scenario. Patients facing surgery, assuming that he or she is healthy enough, can be asked to donate blood for himself or herself prior to the surgery. These autologous donations are reassuring in that there’s no real risk of contagion that the patient doesn’t already have from his or her own blood (though the risk of problems from transfusion is not eliminated). A study conducted in Australia looked into pre-operative autologous donations with the contingent that the donors had to pay to have them held, leaving the choice to either fork out the money and receive his or her own blood packaged and stored in a sterile, proper environment or depend on the national blood centers. Can peace of mind be bought? How far does blind trust reach? All surgery involves risk, but in this manner, there is no question of possession of the blood; the donation has started and ended in the same body. By fearing blood, problems are avoided but not solved.

However, becoming aware about blood won’t fully solve the problem stemming from ignorance either. The best way to quell rumors and stories is to learn more about the subject. Uninformed decisions are recognizably unsafe, falling back to the old adage of “look before you leap.” Yet there’s still a trend to trust in rumor and not in the doctor, or sometimes to put too much trust in a doctor; for example, should a physician prescribe an antibiotic for a viral infection it won’t do anything against the virus). Another example, there is a standing belief that donating, not a transfusion but donating, blood can lead to an HIV infection though when a new, sterile syringe is used for each donor, this ridiculous notion is baffling. Where’s the happy medium between being informed and paranoid, well that’s a personal decision. Learning more about one’s situation helps with closure and acceptance. Learning more about one’s situation does not provide the quick fix. No, doctors don’t always know what to do. Yes, one donation of blood can save three lives. No, blood transfusions will not make the receiver take on some of the personality traits of the donator, a concept best left for sci-fi which manages to make every clone either evil or with the same personality as the original DNA. Yes, contact with blood can mean an infection of some disease or another. Even in the best of situations, something can still go wrong.

A man is an ecosystem all to himself, the individual cells working together to form tissues and organs. Should one species be removed from the ecosystem, the rest suffer. Should a foreign species enter the habitat, it can result in the betterment of the current species or the destruction of that system. It may seem that we don’t need fungi in our forests but the liver breaks down many molecules that we take in, toxins and otherwise. Sometimes, one species can be falling—say a DDT build up has caused the eagles to lay thin-shelled eggs or some new disease causes a population to attack itself—and it takes the rest of the ship down with it. The heart, brain, and kidneys shut down as the immune system attacks the body itself in an effort to maintain the peace. Maintaining this delicate balance is like taking a few drinks too many and trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together: in a stumbling mess, the pieces don’t fit or seem to missing altogether, despite the fact that the box had never before been opened. The picture each piece creates is inexplicably tied with others that it before had nothing to do with, though all are necessary to form a complete image of a barn on a brilliant summer morning. Even should we find all the pieces, the image we create of them could be entirely different that what it ought to be; imagine if some of the round circle parts could be snapped off and placed elsewhere what it would change. Man as a collective is part of an ecosystem, maybe not the commonly thought of sort such as grass plus bunnies plus wolves equals food chain but still existing in a delicate balance. An ecosystem of ecosystems, say the US population tends to have a high ratio of folk finding his or her own way to the hospital. We depend on each other and the materials to be where they are needed. The system is flawed. The system cannot be exactly perfected without stomping over a civil right or two. I cannot convince everyone. What does knowing and awareness change? Depends. I could never tell someone else how to live, having never known his or her experience nor how he or she perceives the goings on. Still, something has changed. By learning something new, even should it be forgotten in a matter of minutes, there is at least a moment of thought. Thinking about death, thinking about others, thinking mostly about yourself. Disease and accidents are bound to happen at some point or another; the Golden Rule works both ways, giving up the prized donkey is not specifically necessary.