blood

Whatever a unit of blood of plasma is—millilitre, milligram?—I am minus 846 of them. The Blood Bank is keen to have my plasma and I am happy to give it to them, even though giving plasma takes twice as long as giving blood.

I am the first person to open the Bank’s door this morning: an 8 am appointment means no waiting. I’m full of liquids—orange juice, water and tea. I fill in the mandatory medical, travel and sexual biography. This is a legal document and is signed in the presence of a witness after my blood pressure, haemoglobin and pulse are taken.

This morning a nurse supervisor is training a new nurse who preps me before pushing the catheter into a raised vein on the inside of my elbow. The tube connects to the centrifuge. When all is ready the clamps are released and the dark red blood flows. Four times it comes back to me, minus the plasma, but followed by cold pink saline.

As a small boy I regularly haemorrhage blood—spontaneous nose-bleeds. One day in sixth grade I lean over a rail and let it bleed till it stops. A clot about 30 centimetres in diameter and millimetres thick congeals on black bitumen. At other times I plug my nose then, to my own mingled horror and delight, gently extract sinuous clots ten or more centimetres long.

I first donate blood as a 19 year-old at university and continue for years in all locations. Then I tick the box to say I’ve had sex with someone who injected drugs and they ban me for five years. In the end the ban endures for 19 years.

I love the beautiful ‘blood’ words: sanguine and sangfroid. Sanguinity, originally ruddiness of the cheeks, comes to denote cheerful optimism and courage. Sangfroid, literally cold blood, is about calmness in the face of danger.

Hippocrates’s theory of human temperament, the four humours—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic—each based on a bodily fluid, has always appealed. I suspect a well-balanced man might be a mix of each in almost equal parts, perhaps with a little superfluity of blood.

   

Rock on.