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. :) :)