Greg A. Brown

Originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Touchstone, Kansas State University’s literary journal. 

Blood drives are very similar to NPR pledge drives, except they literally suck the life out of you. Sadly, though, the Putnam Hall collection site was equally lacking in humor despite a bumper crop of humour. For three days, our lobby had been transformed into a miniature replica of the hospital experience. I was about to journey into this hell, try to give some blood, and hope that my story wouldn’t end with a water buffalo being chopped up to the tune of “The End”While I was ultimately unsuccessful (in a sense), I did manage to avoid one nurse who bore a remarkable resemblance to General Kurtz..

Just like a real hospital, the first thing I experienced was a waiting room. Putnam’s was a sad semblance of the real thing, just a few chairs where you read a long list of the various conditions that bar you from giving blood. The annual K-State All-University Blood Drive had used our lobby as a location for several years running, so the layout had coalesced into the waiting area at the north corner, the interrogation booths along the southeast side, and the remainder of the room used for collection chairs. Some of the prohibited conditions listed were travel overseas during certain dates, a previous bout of malaria, and various sexually transmitted diseases. While the reasons for the latter two were clear, it wasn’t until later in the laminated, metal-ring-bound, and thoroughly person-proof packet that I discovered why they were wary of travelers to the United Kingdom: Creutzfeldy-Jakob disease.

CJD first presents itself as dementia, progressing to problems with speech, balance, movement, and memory, and eventually including personality changes, hallucinations, and everything else bad you can imagine when your brain matter is starting to resemble Swiss cheese. The cause wasn’t truly pinned down until 1982, when Stanley B. Prusiner confirmed that the agent of infection was merely a special class of malformed protein which he called a “prion.”

Bacteria multiply through reproduction to fill a host and viruses hijack a host’s own cells to spread, but prions go about their business a different way. First of all, these prions are folded up in such a way to resist the body’s mechanism for disassembling errant proteins. Secondly, the best evidence we have right now points to the prions spreading by latching onto healthy proteins and perverting them into copies, which then move on to pervert other copies and so on, making it rather similar to Vonnegut’s ice-nineCuriously enough, when I went to verify the formatting of his name on the Wikipedia page, there was already a link back to the prion page as a similar mechanism. I submit this to you as evidence that the internet has entirely too much time on its hands. As further evidence, I’d point out that the prion page had been linked from such diverse topics as “Planet killer” (again making an analogy between prions and ice-nine), “Laughing Owl” (which mistakenly links to the page while instead referring to a type of small seabird), “The Hunger” (which links it to some horror movie starring David Bowie that attempted to serious-up the myth of vampires), and a page discussing how to write the page on abortion. I also submit this list to you as evidence that I have entirely too much time on my hands.. This disease can be spread through blood transfusions – thus sparking concern on the part of the Red Cross – but the traditional pathway in New Guinea has been ritualistic cannibalism: eating the brains of the deceased. So, in a way, it’s also like inverse-zombiesWikipedia has yet to make this connection as of Monday, October 16th, 2006, giving us all some hope for humanity..

Luckily, I’ve never been overseas (unless a jaunt down to Texas counts), and cleanly avoided any of the criteria. So, I upgraded to waiting room part deux outside of the interrogation booths. These were constructed in such a way to shield the rest of the room from the sight and sounds of the nurse and prospective donor. While it succeeded on the latter half, night had fallen and the lobby’s windows transformed into eerily-effective mirrors, allowing those of us waiting on the couches to roughly view what was going on inside. This didn’t help my growing sense of uneaseAdding to the vibe, the reflections in the window seemed to have passed through the same process that they use for dramatic-re-enact-o-vision on TV, making the entire atmosphere that much more unsettling and surreal.. Also creepy were the sections of newspapers lying around, as if someone had brought them to read and then not made it back to retrieve them; this may explain why every single doctor’s office I’ve been in has had unbearable magazines – like 501 Ways to Fail at Trying to Make Something – as if to assure visitors that these were not the artifacts of patients past.

Before I was able to dwell on the matter too deeply, a nurse summoned me to her booth. We smoothly ran through the questions on the packet, albeit with a slight pause as she figured out how to enter a VSD heart murmurA pinhole-sized defect in my heart that allows a very slight amount of oxygen-rich blood to slip to the other ventricle, joining oxygen-poor blood on its trip to the lungs and back to that same ventricle. It’s congenital, but wasn’t detected until three, making it a non-problem except for a slight risk of infection during dental inspection – a risk easily mitigated with some antibiotics an hour before. into the computer system. Then it was on to the medical examination, as she tested to see if I was anemic (nope), chemically-bizarre (nope), or anemic (still nope). After a few more minor tests, I was on my way to a collection chair.

While I didn’t collect any evidence as I was giving blood, the final tally of the blood drive noted 958 “presenting donors,” but only 809 pints of blood collected. There’s only one clear conclusion we can draw from this: 149 people failed miserably. As I sat down in the chair, I quickly ran through my chances again. My dad has always shrugged off blood donation like it’s nothing, whereas my mom fainted every time she tried. The latter was my reason for avoiding donation until now, but as long as I split the difference I should come out OK, right?

When I initially entered the room back at the beginning of this tale, both my elbows started to ache despite never having given blood before. It only increased as the nurse found my left arm’s vein, cleaned the surrounding area, and plunged the needle in. I don’t have a problem with needles, having received enough shots over the years to stop caring, but that was no needle. It may have been the circumstances, but in the moments before insertion, that thing looked like it wouldn’t fit in a compact car slot. However, I somehow managed to ignore it (along with my memories a week or two beforehand of re-watching Requiem for a Dream).

Instead, I tried to concentrate on the illustrious career of bleeding. Yes, while blood donations have a relatively short-lived history, bloodletting (aka “phlebotomy”Today, phlebotomy refers to the drawing of blood for medical testing. Bloodletting still survives to treat abnormal build-ups of iron in bodily tissues, almost as if the humours were getting their revenge under the guise of our modern periodic table.) in general has built up a wonderful amount of infamy over the years. George Washington was killed by it, as was Robin Hood. Perhaps the most tragic case is that of Lady Ada Lovelace, a 19th century mathematician who wrote, among other things, the world’s first computer program. Sadly, though, her life was cut short at the age of 36 when she was bled to death during treatment for uterine cancer. Perhaps this wasn’t the best thing to distract my mind with.

Snapping back to reality, the nurse had thoughtfully given me a much better distraction: some heart-shaped squeeze-thingie that she said to put in my left hand and said to squeeze and release on a five-second, three-second rhythm. This alone was enough to tax my weary brain and I set to work squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing. After a minute or two of doing so, I realized my hands were starting to feel kind of strange, like I couldn’t really feel them anymore. Additionally, my stomach started to ache. The nurses noticed my unease, and asked if I was still doing ok. I kept on answering yes, until about five minutes in, when eye-witnesses say about half the color had drained from my face. The nurses seemed to think that my eyes were starting to glaze over too, and so snapped into action.

They quickly brought the back of the seat down so that it slanted slightly backwards, and brought the legs up so they pointed towards the ceiling. Two cold, wet washcloths were placed on my face and neck, and soon the nurses crowded around me.

“Wanna know how to make an old woman happy?”

“Whuh?”

“I said, wanna know how to make an old woman happy?” It was one of the older nurses standing above and to the left of me.

“I, uh, I don’t know.”

“You give her a Visa! You brought your Visa here, right? You got a Visa in your pocket?”

“Uh… no, I don’t.I lied, although technical distinctions may yet save my credibility, as it was a debit card, thus removing the unique reason for joy over more antiquated methods of payment (such as checks). Visa still handles the technical details of each transaction. I still lied, though, because my brain had long since chosen fleeing over fighting, and while my extremities remained stubbornly inactive, I still made what I felt to be a symbolic stand. That and my internal monologue at this point boiled down to OH GOD HUMAN CONTACT WHAT ESCAPE.”

By this point they’d surrounded me in a tableau, with faces popping in from the left, right, and top sides of my vision.

“Well, that’s a shame.”

Now another one chimed in. “Want to really know how to make an old lady happy?”

“I… uh…uh”

“You let her flash you!” At the word flash, the woman grabbed the bottom of her nurse’s shirt, and started lifting it upwards at a startling speed. It is at this point eyewitnesses agree that the rest of the color drained from my face. But before I could even cognitively process what was going on, it was over. The shirt had never even made it up halfway, and the entire room had enjoyed a laugh. It was my turn, on the other hand, to be that guy who awkwardly laughs way after everyone else.

After a few minutes of lying in the sloped-backwards position, the numbness in my hands subsided, only to be replaced by the incessant tingling of restored nervous contact. After a while, even that had faded along with the stomach ache, and a nurse assessed me as ready to go. He led me to the hospitality area, flanked by two of my friends who were volunteering at the time, and made sure I got some water and food. According to the sign advertising the drive, I had just saved three lives. It was a comforting thought, especially as I sat there trying to get my bearings, all the while breaking my animal crackers into piecesWhy is it that people always seem to go for the heads first when eating food shaped like animals? In the case of the giraffe, it’s a question of ease, but with graham cracker bears and other delicious delicacies the pattern still holds. Do I first eat the ears and head of that chocolate rabbit so I don’t see it smiling back at me while I munch on its lower abdomen? Does the mere presence of that smile on a chocolate rabbit say something about us? Is anyone else seriously creeped out right now? and waiting for the rhythmic throbbing in my head to End.