The Red Cross

Today, they threw my blood away. Yes, the Red Cross didn't need my blood.

A few years ago, a doctor mentioned to me that I had the gene for hemochromatosis, which is a blood disorder whose main feature is that iron doesn't get washed out or dissolved or whatever happens to it through the normal course of digestion. It stays in the body, collecting in the joints and, more dangerously, the organs, causing early death and annoyance. And of course, armed with this news, I promptly forgot all about it.

Flash forward to this spring, when a blood test revealed abnormally high levels of iron in my blood. It was a little unnerving. The doc showed me the sheet full of test results, and my eye immediately went past all the digits and incomprehensible abbreviations, to the bold red ink which, in all caps, sirened ALERT! It even had the exclamation point, though really, the red ink was enough for me. Punctuation was a little redundant at that point. I mean, there wasn't much chance there'd be ALERT?, was there? Or ALERT;

So, I was referred to a gastro-enterologist, which is the specialist who, in addition to your guts and pancreas and liver, also handles this hemo thing. I told her I had hemochromatosis, and after weeks of tests, which included a colonoscopy, an Upper GI, and a liver biopsy, she was able to tell me that...I had hemochromatosis.

There is no drug for this thing. It is something that affects mainly people of northern European heritage (thanks mom and dad--couldn't be Italian or Lebanese, couldja?-- you Scots-Irish-German bastards!), and is the most commonly inherited disease of that tribe, according to Dr. Wikipedia. The treatment is medieval--every so often, I go in and they drain me of a few pints of the red stuff, and that's supposed to set things right as rain, for a while. They don't use leeches, though, but that seems to be the only difference. I tried to go in a give blood back when I first saw the ALERT!, but the Red Cross turned me down after testing my blood. They said it would clot in the bag, and that I needed a prescription for them to do a "therapeutic draw."

So that's what I did today. Prescription in hand, I went to the Red Cross center, did a little paperwork, and then they drained me of a pint of my valuable, iron-laden juice. I watched the nurse take the warm bag of blood, and the tube that connected me to it, and carried them to a large trash can covered with HAZ MAT stickers, and dropped them in.

No chance to feel like a hero here. Even though I was doing it for myself, for my own health, I looked forward to getting the blood donor sticker that I could wear around for a day or two, along with my bright red gauze that, seen together, would announce to the world " This man cares about his fellow man--he donates blood!" I saw myself steering conversations around to it at dinners:

" Do you like your steak rare, sir?"

" You bet," I'd say," The rarer the better, gotta replace some of that stuff I donated, ya know."

Or maybe I'd be on the scene of an auto accident, standing there with the other rubberneckers, and the driver would be bleeding from a head wound, and I'd announce, " Too bad I can't give any blood to help this man--it's too soon after my last donation! You have to wait a few months, ya know."

But no sticker for me. I was lucky they even gave me a cookie. They didn't bother to thank me, and why should they, really? I wasn't doing anything for them. In fact, I was interfering with their proper duties, the collection of blood for local hospitals. Every time they have to bleed me, they are taking time out from the heroes who donate for selfless reasons. Those people's blood was going out to help war veterans, pregnant mothers, children in dire need of the lifesaving fluid.

Mine? They didn't need it. Didn't want it. Threw it away in a dumpster, where it will be hauled out, and either incinerated (a sort of dress rehearsal for my cremation), or shipped along with all the other selfish people's blood to a facility in New York, where some day it will suddenly wash up at Jones Beach (a dress rehearsal for my move to New York).