An Open Letter to my Blood Donors

Dear You,

I’m writing to thank you for the blood you gave me.

I wasn’t dying—for some reason I feel like I need to apologize for this. Maybe you were hoping you would actually save a life, like the commercials and print ads always say you will, but you didn’t this time. I’m sorry. I was awake and talking, and I wouldn’t have gone into the light if your bag of blood hadn’t been available.

But, man, things would have suuuuuuuuuuucked.

I don’t even want to think about what those weeks after my daughter’s birth would have been like without you. I have friends who didn’t get blood tranfusions after hemorrhaging, but they’re superheroes, and I’m pretty lame. I got your blood two days after a c-section and the day after the nurses asked me to walk to the bathroom and I nearly passed out upon sitting up. The only reason I didn’t black out was because there was a siren going off in my brain and some version of myself screaming, “If you pass out and fall, WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR STITCHES??”

As it turned out, I made it back down flat onto the bed without popping open, and then the oldest nurse in America held one of my legs up in the air and my husband held the other, to get my leg-blood to fall into my brain. My mom sat on a chair nearby, held her new granddaughter, and cried. I didn’t cry, because blood loss makes you too stupid to realize that you should be super-embarrassed about lying flat in a hospital gown with your legs in the air while the leg-holders discuss what they’re going to do with pitiful you.

When the nurses came in and took the bag of saline off the hook-pole-thingy and put your bag up there, I read the label.

“HUMAN BLOOD.”

Then under that: “A, Rh-POSITIVE.”

Then under that: “VOLUNTEER DONOR.”

That’s when I turned my head and started to cry. When I got to “VOLUNTEER DONOR.” Because all I could think of was you, and I didn’t have a face or a name or anything. But it was like you were right there. In the last few months I’ve made up a hundred versions of you: the stay-at-home mom with three boys. A bus driver. In one version of you, you earned a Ph.D. in literature while serving out a prison sentence for a crime I couldn't decide on. I wonder about you constantly.

I made sure my husband took a picture of me with your blood, like it was a celebrity. My mom rolled her eyes.

Two units took all day, but the bags have four tubes that can run out of them, for people who need it faster. They gave me the slow drip, and I got to chat with my husband and my mom and my new wee babe and eat as many Oreos as I wanted. They take the locks off the Oreos when you get blood! That part was awesome. My baby was allowed to nurse during the whole thing, which is kind of amazing when you think about it: I needed you and she needed me. She needed you.

So your blood made many people feel better. I got a transfusion because I wasn’t able to manage basic functions, and my worried mom got to see me kind of wake up, as it were, and be able to sit up, and eventually I even peed. Your blood made that possible. You helped me be able to breastfeed. And you comforted my older daughter, who looked at me on her sister’s birthday and had been afraid of what she saw. Two days later, she could crawl into bed with me, and we could snuggle. You did that for her.

Maybe you’ll also want to know that they didn’t give me your donation willy-nilly. It’s not a buffet in Bon Temps. 2 liters drained out during surgery, or 30% of my blood, and what I got from you and the other donor bumped me up to about 20% down. I didn’t get to go all the way back up to normal, which was fine with me. I was okay, and I’m glad those other bags went to other people. By the end of the second bag (of blood, not of Oreos), I felt so much better.

Because I was awake the whole time, not like a lot of people who get blood transfusions in surgery or in cases of trauma, or babies who are too young to say, I want to try to explain what it feels like. Forgive me, but there’s no way to explain it literally, and I wish I could separate out the physiological result from the spiritual and emotional part I found pretty overwhelming, but I can’t. This kind of difficulty may be one of the reasons figurative language exists.

Receiving blood over the course of an eight-hour day is like having thousands of tiny flowers in your body—pick any flower you like, but pick a small one and think of that (for whatever it’s worth, in my mind they are tiny, white, bell-shaped flowers)—and then having them open and look up at the sun, one at a time, one bloom every second, for a whole day. That’s what it felt like.

It felt like being light. Light as in lighter. Light as in some faint illumination. Before your blood, my body felt stony, heavy. If someone told me your red cells had a little helium in them, that would seem about right.

I’m guessing it didn’t feel like being high—that comparison would be too extreme.

It felt like eating after starving for two days.

It felt like being loved deeply. That sounds so cheesy, and I don’t care. It felt like you loved me, and like humanity, who made this human-run system—draw blood, refrigerate blood, drip blood as needed—loved me. Like everyone got together and said, “Let’s not let people go bloodless. That would be good. We will include Ginny.” This paragraph is not figurative. But this system is mind-blowing. You may disagree about whether what we have in place is mind-blowing, but that may be because you have given blood and have not needed to receive it.

VOLUNTEER DONOR, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re 17 or 87. I don’t know if you’re a sharp dresser or if you care about sports or manicures or if we would laugh at the same jokes or if you voted like I did in the last election or think like I do about anything or would find me a pretty big waste of your blood.

I wonder if I would be disappointing to you somehow. If you’d be bummed that your donation didn’t go to someone caught in some dramatic circumstance or terrible event, but to a woman whose blood slipped perfectly silently out of her and into a waiting container, under the most strictly controlled conditions possible, in a small hospital no one has heard of.

And then I think, you gave your blood away.

What kind of person does that?

You gave your blood away.

And you got nothing but a cookie and a sticker that said, “Be Nice to Me. I Gave Blood.”

VOLUNTEER DONOR, if I ever met you, I would cover you in those stickers like a scaly sticker-mummy. I would hug you until it just got so awkward, and I would cry on your sticker-crusted collar because I weep really easily except apparently when I’m low on RBC’s.

Your blood, and the blood of another volunteer donor, helped move oxygen around in my body for 120 days.

For the eight months I carried my daughter, my heart beat blood for two people. For four months after that, my heart beat the blood of three people.

I thought of you every hour of every one of those days, and at the end of the 120 days, I actually said, out loud like a lunatic, Good-bye and thank you. Not because you saved my life, for we have already established that you did not (sorry again), but because in a year of my life, April to April, that saw thousands of human cruelties worldwide, you still remain here, in my heart, long after your red blood cells have withered and gone away. The celebrity photo of your donation is a stunning reminder of humanity’s nearly inexplicable capacity for kindness at the level of Giving a Part of One’s Own Body Away to a Stranger One Will Never Meet.

A few years ago, Tina Fey wrote “A Mother’s Prayer for Her Daughter.” The ending goes like this:

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord,

That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 a.m., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck.

“My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a mental note to call me. And she will forget.

But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

You let me be that exhausted mom who had just enough strength and energy to clean poop off her baby at four in the morning. I can’t donate blood until September, but when I do, I won’t forget. Someone did this for me once.

And I hope God gives you, for even a brief, fleeting, flickering moment that you may not fully understand, a chance to peek in with His God eyes and see a part of your generous heart beating forward yet again. 

Love Always,

Me

ps: My friend Erin asked me to tack on her daughter Kate's name to this letter. Kate is four and became a blood recipient when she was six months old. She and her mama thank you as well. :)

pps: And TwynMawrMom thanks you on behalf of her daughter, Baby A. :) :)

Treehuggers

Hurricane Irene has come and gone through Currituck County, washing away a few stretches of road and flooding plenty of low-lying land. It happens a lot in that region, and many locals, especially those whose families have lived in the county long before The Weather Channel could tell them to evacuate, just stay put and weather the storm, literally.

Damage is measured in soaking wet garages, buckled hardwood floors, missing screens, broken glass, and fallen trees. It’s measured too, of course, in lives, but no one goes there unless they're forced to.

I remember one year after a season of hurricanes, my cousins’ grandparents (the set we didn’t share) finally decided that the few pines left in their yard just needed to go before they fell through the house. We drove by their home, and I remember looking at the yard, which used to be as shaded as the woods even though it was waterfront property, and thinking, “It’s BALD!” The yard looked different, but stranger still, the house looked different—a little awkward, spookily tall, too scantily clad. I felt sorry for it.

There’s a hierarchy of tree loss, it seems. Pine and cypress go, and that’s just life. If they fall onto open ground without shearing off part of a house or crunching a car, they’re removed like any other debris. Fat trees are different. The thick branch of an oak, severed in a storm, is met with a kind of grief that glimmers with what we’d normally reserve for animals or people. Even if the tree survives, we say to each other, “But it’s lopsided now. It looks crooked. Hope it grows full again…” It’s not an arm, but we act as if it is.

When they topple, well, that’s just its own thing. There’s no other way of talking about it. A tree fell. A big tree, a good one.

Irene’s rains and the wind that sent the sound’s waves up over the bulkhead of my mother’s backyard softened the earth enough that at some point, the gusts of the massive storm shoved her only pecan tree to the ground. The tree fell whole, roots still holding onto the soil like a clenched fist, and she took a bowlful of mushy earth up with her in the falling. She landed toward the house, but my mother’s yard is long and wide and the pecan landed in the empty space like it was a bed.

I married Mark under that tree, about a decade after I decided I was going to marry someone under that tree, if I ever got married. My friend and bridesmaid Liz, whose own wedding was a fabulous affair at one of Washington, D.C.’s best hotels, gave a toast at the reception and said, “Ginny told me after my wedding, ‘I’m just getting married under Mom’s pecan tree.’ And now, here we are. The day is here.”

And so was the tree.

We had protected the pecan for as long as she was ours. I swear if we could have brought that tree inside during storms, we would have, with the lawn chairs. When Hurricane Isabel barreled through in 2003, the tree began to lean southward. She was staked, the metal cable anchored about six feet away into the lawn. When I returned from Thailand, I brought with me the brightly colored strips of cloth used to decorate Bo trees and the longboats. The Bo tree is sacred to Buddhists; there were trees in Thailand that could barely be seen under their adornments. The longboats sailed with the fabric tied around their bows like scarves, for protection from harm. I loved the bright colors and the sentiment, and I tied each strip around the pecan tree and just asked the universe to let her stand until I got married. I was single at the time. Very single.

When my mom called to tell me that the pecan tree had fallen, I posted a picture of her from our wedding onto my Facebook wall, letting everyone know what happened. I thought a few people would comment and say that they were sorry to hear it, that they were glad everyone was safe, and go on with their day.

To my surprise, people were truly moved. They seemed genuinely grieved the way I was. My friend Mike, who is Liz’s husband, sent articles on how to right a fallen tree, hopeful that it could be done. I wrote to him and thanked him, but said that since the pecan tree is so big, so top-heavy, I didn’t think she had a chance.

The reaction reminded me of the poisoning of Toomer's Oaks at Auburn University, when a rabid Alabama football fan took a powerful herbicide to the rival campus’s 130-year old oaks. People were outraged. Auburn fans brought gifts to the trees and placed them at their trunks. One reporter even called the poisoning an “assassination.” It became a commentary on football, on sportsmanship, on the dignity of life, and mostly on cruelty. Ironically, humans do worse to humans, grant less dignity and freedom to each other, and it doesn’t become a lesson the way it does when the victims are plants. The act either becomes something less, or as in the case of the Auburn oaks, something much more.

I don’t know why this is; I only know that it is. Trees, I think, and flowers, have a kind of dual existence; they are both living and yet mostly still. It’s something we have trouble being ourselves. It’s no wonder that the Buddha, upon reaching enlightenment, stared unblinking at the Bo tree in gratitude. Trees can be touchstones of perspective. I dare you to find a big uncrowded tree, surrounded only by land or a bit of water, and tell me it hasn’t made you a little happier. It’s just nice. And trees are timeless, too—unless you’re a landscaper, or one of those fashionable people who believes that every thing on earth can have its "moment," there really are no trendy trees. Buildings, streets, cars, and clothes change. Trees grow a bit each year, or die, but their kind is not the one dating years and decades. The pecan tree did not look much different on my wedding day than it did the ten years before when I decided I would get married under it. All that changing I did—the tree didn’t need it. How lucky for her.

Johnny, my mom’s neighbor and a man that just seems always to be a great help in these kinds of situations, told my mom yesterday that he thought the tree could be righted. Johnny’s home is a working farm where he keeps horses and cows, and in a thunderstorm a few months back, one of those horses was struck by lightning and died instantly. In my heart I wonder if he saw the pecan tree as a life that could be saved, something not so far gone it couldn’t maybe come back.

There is a line. It’s gray sometimes though…

He did say that it would be a lot of work, and that the job might be cost-prohibitive.

To which Mom said, “Or not.”

So, one Johnny, two helpers, one backhoe, two chainsaws, and one steel cable--running from her trunk to an anchoring post in the Currituck Sound--and she’s back, just a little worse for the wear. If she stays a while, lovely. If she decides it’s time to go, that’s okay too. We just wanted to give her a little more time to stand by the water and think about it.