Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (6 page)

With the medical community electrified by Harvey’s discovery, a new interest was sparked in injecting substances directly into the bloodstream. But a simple means for such a procedure did not exist. Enter: British architect Christopher Wren. In 1656 Wren fashioned a crude syringe from a hollow feather quill fastened to a bladder and was able to pump opium straight into a dog’s vein, thus creating a method for IV therapy as well as one very mellow pooch. Wren’s success inspired others to infuse animals with not just medications but also wine, beer, milk, urine, anything liquid—often with fatal results—and eventually to try blood. In 1665 the British anatomist Richard Lower performed the first successful blood transfusion in animals, linking one dog’s artery to a recipient dog’s vein with a quill piping. The transfused dog had first been bled almost to death, so its fast return to vim was hugely dramatic, bordering on miraculous. The floodgates were now thrown wide open.

The next step: animal-to-human blood transfusions. Over the following couple of years, a spate of attempts were made, though none for what we’d now consider logical or medically appropriate reasons—to treat hemorrhage, say, or to bolster red blood cells in acute anemia. The physiological unknowns at the time were considerable. Neither the component parts of blood nor its role in transporting oxygen, nutrients, hormones, and pathogens had yet been discovered. Interestingly, the idea of blood compatibility
was
considered, though not in the modern sense of the phrase. (Blood typing did not arise until the early 1900s.) Rather, a transfuser had to be cautious when mixing blood because it contained qualities. As perfume was the essence of a flower, so blood was a concentrate of traits, whether in man or beast. A fearless soldier had brave blood, for instance. A raging bull had angry blood. In theory, then, a transfusion had the potential to restore strength to the weak, calm to the crazy, and so on. Hence in 1667 French scientist Jean-Baptiste Denis introduced the docile blood of a calf into the circulatory system of a raving madman. But did it work? Well, Denis thought he had triumphed. The recipient had vomited profusely and urinated what looked like liquid coal—he was being purged of his lunacy! From a modern take, however, we know the man was suffering a severe transfusion reaction and was lucky to have survived. But the story didn’t end there. Before a follow-up transfusion could be performed, tragedy intervened. The man’s long-suffering wife had finally had enough and administered a lethal dose of arsenic, thus bringing both the marriage and the experiment to a close.

Emblematic representations of the four temperaments associated with each of the humors of the body. A slight excess of one humor determined whether your natural disposition was sanguine (surplus blood), choleric (yellow bile), phlegmatic (phlegm), or melancholic (black bile). Engravings by sixteenth-century German artist Virgil Solis

News of Denis’s initial “success” emboldened scientists to consider human-to-human blood transfusions. To the great minds of the seventeenth century, William Harvey included, this seemed like sound science because a belief in humoral theory was still widespread. A person in good health always had slightly more of one humor than the other three, and this excess determined the kind of person you were. Extra yellow bile made you
choleric
—a disagreeable sort. A tad more blood and you were
sanguine
—cheerful, optimistic. Remnants of this Doctrine of Temperaments, as it was known, survive to this day in the related words
melancholic
and
phlegmatic.
In an extrapolation of these factors, a German surgeon named Johann Elsholtz proposed in 1667 the use of transfusion as a remedy for marital discord. Would not the mood of a melancholic husband be lightened by transfusing him with the blood of his effusive and sanguine wife? And, flowing the other way, might not the wife become more temperate? The mutual exchange of blood between mates could heighten understanding between them—seventeenth-century couples therapy without all the talking.

Elsholtz never had the chance to move beyond the hypothetical, however. Magistrates throughout Europe could not ignore the reality that transfusions were killing people, and a ban was implemented in 1668. (In fact, it would be another 250 years before safe, effective human-to-human transfusions would be performed.) Though relegated to a minor historical footnote, Elsholtz was nevertheless on to something, I choose to believe, if only by a shiny thread of whimsy.

WITH THE POTENTIAL FOR DISEASE FACTORED OUT, TO BE INFUSED with what runs in Steve’s veins would mean being imbued with, among other qualities, his innate sanguineness and his long-lived love of comic books. The latter started in the summer of 1975 at Lefti’s corner store in East Hanover, New Jersey, where he grew up. Steve was twelve when he picked up an issue of
Fantastic Four.
It was about a family, he thought, albeit an unconventional one—three guys and a girl, two of them related by blood, united in fighting on the side of good. Steve, one of four kids himself, found it fun, but another title in the Marvel Comics Universe really grabbed him:
X-Men.
With his first issue,
Giant Size X-Men
#1, he was hooked. That it was a number one played a part. Like everyone else in his family, Steve was a collector—Wacky Pack gum cards and Flintstones jelly glasses were favorites. Now he had the starting point for a new collection, one that would grow over the years to thousands of issues currently stored in long boxes in all our closets.

From its inception, what made
X-Men
different from other comics was that it introduced the idea of mutants into the superhero pantheon. These characters weren’t the victims of freakish science experiments gone wrong or of sudden exposure to mysterious biohazards; they were born that way—they had a genetic quirk in their DNA, an X-factor. Their powers, though, often didn’t manifest until their teen years. You woke up one morning to find your body was starting to change. The intended parallel was to puberty, but to any readers who saw in themselves something shameful, the X-Men struck a deeper chord. Although they were heroes doing good, the mutant X-Men were grossly misunderstood, despised by society at large, hunted down by the government. Where Superman was lauded in the bright light of day, the X-Men had to stick to the shadows.

With its monthly tales of prejudice and perseverance, the comic book slowly instilled in Steve a resolve that would make his coming out far less torturous than mine. Not being an only son or raised a devout Catholic also helped ease his way. It seemed perfectly normal to him to keep secret his “identity” while at the same time accepting it as a natural part of himself. Just as mutations occurred in nature, so did homosexuality. He also knew a time and a place would come when he could safely expose this aspect of himself. High school was just not it. He never doubted that a real-world correlate to the X-Men existed, a group somewhere who’d accept him.

I read the occasional comic book as a kid, yet they were never a constant in my life. While I could’ve named the major superheroes, my taste ran more to
Richie Rich
and
Archie’s Pals & Gals.
Now, viewing superhero comics through Steve’s eyes, I see not only how much they’ve evolved but also how, with their godlike heroes and grand-scale drama, they are like the ancient Greek tales I’ve always loved. Superhero comics are the medium of modern myths.

Their unique dynamism, I’ve learned, hinges on a device that’s crucial to this art form: the blank space between panels—the gutter, it’s called. Much happens in these narrow strips of nothing. There, your mind takes two scenes and bridges them, filling in the elements that are not drawn or lettered. A fist is thrown in one panel; the villain careens backward in the next; but you envision the wallop. The moment of impact and the crunch of cartilage are your creations, as is the breadth of emotion. An eerie calm can stretch as long as you decide. This involvement turns you from a mere reader of the comic book into a collaborator, a member of the creative team that makes the story work.

Time passes at a slower rate in a comic-book universe than in our own. While it’s been almost thirty years since Steve picked up his first superhero comic, in Marvel Time, as it’s called, only a few years have gone by. So when Steve reads the latest issue of
Uncanny X-Men
, say, he meets up with old friends who’ve hardly aged since he was a kid. Up till now I’d thought this was the whole appeal, a sweet nostalgia trip for a forty-year-old man battling AIDS, a well-deserved escape from his reality. But it’s clearly more. There’s a powerful draw in a stack of comics. In their pages, overwhelming odds are overcome. Good guys win. Death is not always final. And the question
What comes next?
is never frightening. It’s exciting.

The only time he reads comic books, I notice, is at bedtime. It’s shortly after he’s taken his handful of nighttime meds. His stomach roils, sorting out the pills, sending them out through his blood. His feet, pinging like sonar from the pain of his neuropathy, kick at the sheets. His fingers are almost too numb to turn the thin paper. Though the sedating effect of the drugs sets in, he fights to stay awake, to read another page, then another, just one more. I give up before he does and turn out my reading light. Before drifting off, I look over. Steve’s smiling. He’s lost to another world, fighting the good fight in the space between panels.

F
OUR

Blood Sister

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID GROWING UP IN 1960s Spokane, I associated blood with the rough-and-tumble world of brothers. Though I had no brothers of my own, I could always go to my best friend’s house to be among some. Conversely, Chris Porter came over to mine to be around sisters, for he had just one and I had a surplus—five. I almost never saw blood at our house. My sisters played board games, not ball games. Twister was about as rough as it got. Sure, we had Mercurochrome and a tin of Band-Aids in our medicine cabinet for skinned knees and mosquito bites so scratched over they bled. The Porters, by comparison, had an actual first-aid kit, stocked with pads of gauze the size of sandwich bread, splints, and a tourniquet.
A tourniquet! How cool was that?
Their house was a two-minute bike ride away, a place expressly outfitted, I now realize, for boys to burn off energy. Outside, Chris and his three brothers had a basketball hoop mounted in a cement-filled tire, a tree fort, and a garage filled with every sort of sports weaponry imaginable—lawn darts, baseball bats, and cracked hockey sticks still good for whacking crab apples into the neighbor’s yard. In the downstairs rec room there was a pool table and a punching bag and a floor so often cluttered with stuff—strips of Hot Wheels track, zillions of Matchbox cars, plastic soldiers, Erector Set buildings, Lincoln Log barricades—that Mrs. Porter routinely used one of those wide janitorial brooms to clear a path for herself to the pantry area, mercilessly toppling the mini metropolises in her way. She had a don’t-mess-with-me severity my mother lacked, an I-don’t-have-time-for-this quality, but the most radical difference between the two of them was that Mrs. Porter worked outside the home, something no other woman in our neighborhood did. She was the part-time nurse to her husband, Dr. Porter, a GP with an office nearby. Though always back home by the time school let out, Nurse Porter was never off duty. She knew back then, for instance, that I had what would now be called “white coat syndrome”—the skyrocketing of blood pressure and anxiety during a doctor’s appointment. I liked Mr. Porter, but
Dr.
Porter terrified me. To get around this, during a lull in Chris’s and my playing, she would sweep in, strap the blood pressure cuff on my arm, and, before my heart could start racing, she’d have already pumped and squeezed out the result. “See?” she’d say to me. “Perfectly normal.” Oh, she was crafty, that Mrs. P. And unflappable. I remember once being out under the carport with Chris when little Melissa Parker ran up wailing in a voice that could’ve shaken the fort from the tree: “Andy cracked his head open!” Sure enough, her bloodied brother, wheelbarrowed by two friends, soon bounced up the driveway. The Porter boys and I watched, straddling that gulf between horror and fascination, as their mom calmly sprang into action. Alas, so much blood for what ended up needing so few stitches! Time and again, as spectator and sometime recipient, such injuries reinforced in me the same equation: Blood was a guy thing, not a girl thing. Little did I know that there was a tide of female blood in my own home, and it seldom ebbed.

As the only boy in an Irish Catholic family, I was deeply conscious of how differently my parents viewed a son as opposed to daughters. The fifth of six kids, from the earliest age I felt genuinely prized, an individual whereas my sisters were often lumped together. We were “Billy and the Girls,” like a pop band in which, long before I could talk, I’d been named lead singer. The Hayes daughters were raised with the expectation that they’d eventually marry and have children. I was led to believe I’d go to West Point, as had Dad, carry on the family name, and one day take over the family business, a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Only-boy-ness also meant having no hand-me-downs, whether clothes or bicycles or books, plus exclusive access to Dad, who took me alone to the drive-through car wash and to “he-man movies” such as
True Grit.
As the supplier of soda pop to all of Spokane’s sporting events, he received free passes to hockey games, boxing matches, the annual rodeo, and off we’d go. It was as if manliness were a destination to which Dad regularly led me. Father and son, we’d sit in the bleachers most Sunday afternoons, sharing bags of roasted peanuts and time away from “the squaws,” as he called my sisters and mom. We’d make it home just in time for dinner. As it was every night, the dinner table was like a game of musical chairs, the girls constantly popping up to fetch this or that while Dad and I remained seated, never lifting a finger.

I’d had my own bedroom since the summer after my seventh birthday. Before that, I’d roomed for as long as I could remember with my sister Shannon, who was then unceremoniously moved in with “the baby,” four-year-old Julia. Shannon was two years older than me and the sister to whom I was closest. Togetherness hadn’t ended with our getting separate bedrooms. Her best friend, Mary Kay, was Chris’s sister, so our paths often also crossed at the Porters’, as well as at school and catechism class. Our connectedness as children was one of complements: Her emotions bubbled over, I held mine in. It’s something we still joke and talk about today: Shannon cried enough for the two of us, if not the whole family. And yet, as the fourth daughter, she was always somewhat misplaced, not allied with the eldest three and rarely getting the attention from Mom and Dad both Julia and I received. Though younger than Shannon, I tried to act like her protective big brother.

To the senior daughters, Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie, I was the baby brother they doted on but who also got in their way every day in the tiny bathroom we all shared. We called it “the yellow bathroom,” for it was tiled the dusty color of lemon drops. We never shared the bathroom to the extent of bathing or using the toilet in front of one another; the locked door guaranteed privacy. But in the final minutes before bolting out of the house for school or church, we all ended up in there at once. In the large mirror above the twin sinks, my sisters and I were a jumble of pressing bodies, a photo booth filled to capacity. From memory, I pluck a typical scene: It is a school morning in 1969. I’m a second-grader at Comstock Elementary. We’ve all got to be out of the house in fifteen minutes.

I’m in there first, as my bedroom is right next door and I’m already dressed, having laid out my clothes the night before—brown cords, a white shirt, and a belt; not much to it. At either side of the sinks are three drawers labeled with our names on masking tape. Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie have the left side; Shannon, Julia, and I, the right. Based on actual need, I could use the tiny ledge behind the toothbrush holder for the few possessions my bathroom drawer houses. It rattles as I yank it open, the lonesome sound of a comb and a tie clip. By contrast, the girls’ drawers barely close, containing overgrown thickets of hairstyling paraphernalia and such.

I load Crest onto my toothbrush as Colleen enters, the first sister in. The eldest, she’s always the first at everything. First to be confirmed at St. Augustine’s, to go on a diet, to part her hair in the middle, to enter high school. A freshman at Lewis and Clark, she is twice my age, which, in my reckoning, puts her in roughly the same age bracket as redwoods and our parents. Colleen wants to be a fashion model; she has the most to accomplish here. She starts by tugging from her dirty-blond hair the pink foam rollers she’s slept in, tossing them one by one back into her drawer.

Ellen and Maggie are next in, and the four of us automatically reconfigure. I now sit on the toilet seat, ostensibly still brushing my teeth, as Colleen takes the middle position, and Ellen and Maggie commandeer the sinks. Though they’re roommates, close in age, and both attend Sacajawea junior high, they are opposites. Ellen is most Dad-like in being the bossiest child, an excellent student, and a voracious reader. She also has terrible eyesight, her one apparent vulnerability. When she takes off her thick lenses to wash her face, she can hardly see well enough to find a towel. No-nonsense in every way, she reminds me of Velma, my favorite character from
Scooby-Doo.
Maggie, like Mom, is artistic. Her wrists jangle with jewel-colored bracelets she’s made herself from debristled, melted-down toothbrushes. Her fingernails might as well be painted with nail polish—they’re stained scarlet with Rit fabric dye from her latest project, a batik bedspread. Maggie sidesteps the parental ban on wearing makeup by dabbing Vaseline on her lashes, then crimping them with a torturous-looking eyelash curler. She hides her Bonne Bell lip gloss in her purse, to be applied at school.

At this point there’s not much room for Shannon, a fourth-grader at Comstock. With great hesitance, as if it’s a tough decision, she selects from her drawer the brush she always uses and starts untangling her long, dark-chocolate-colored hair. Ellen, finished with rubber-banding her braces, steps behind Shannon and plucks the brush from her hand. “One braid or two?” she asks.

“One,” Shannon says. “I don’t wanna look like Pippi Longstocking again.”

In toddles Julia, who is just five and, like me, drawn more to the crowd than by any pressing bathroom business. As I rinse and spit, Julia’s eyes follow me, expectant. With deliberate showiness, I take up a clean plastic cup, twirl in some Crest, then blast it under the faucet so that the cup bubbles over with fluoridated froth. Julia beams as I hand her the toothpaste float, and she promptly dips her nose in it. She soon has the bathroom to herself, however, as the older girls fly from the house to the honks of carpools, and Shannon and I scurry down the block to Comstock.

As much as I loved being around my sisters, as familiar as they were to me, I also found them mysterious at times, particularly the eldest three. Some mornings, for example, they mentioned things in the yellow bathroom I did not understand, lapsing into coded girltalk before shooing me from the room, locking the door behind me. From my bedroom, ear to the adjoining wall, I could never quite make out their muffled chatter. Of course the Hayes girls did in fact share a private language, and one afternoon, when I was ten, the secret decoder ring was placed in my hand.

Panicky and insistent, Shannon pulled me into the bathroom. She looked as if she’d committed some horrible sin and was expecting to hear at any moment the booming voice of our father. Normally, when either of us got into big trouble, we’d be each other’s first confessor and consoler, so I asked, “Did you do something wrong?”

“Cramps,” she said. “I started having cramps.”

The Hayes siblings in 1967, left to right: Julia in Mom’s lap, me, Shannon, Maggie, Ellen with the white gloves, and Colleen

Had Shannon’s and my entries into puberty coincided, I might have been quicker on the uptake. But I was a fourth-grader who’d yet to sprout a single body hair, have my sex talk with Dad, or see the infamous health education film reserved for fifth-graders.

Cramps,
though, was not an unfamiliar word. It was how Ellen excused herself early from the dinner table, without even asking permission from Dad. It was Maggie’s password to freedom from attending church, the excuse that was never denied. I, too, had had cramps, with a bellyache or the stomach flu, but boy-cramps were far less contagious than girl-cramps. No sooner did one sister begin to feel better than another was murmuring “Cramps” and disappearing behind the yellow bathroom door.

As Shannon pulled me down next to her on that cool tiled floor, she appeared far more upset than I’d ever seen any of my other sisters. She sat against the toilet, which seemed prudent. She looked like she was going to upchuck.

“So, are you sick?”

She took a long time to answer “No,” which left me certain the answer was yes. “I got my period,” Shannon sputtered.

As I later learned, Mom had anticipated this day. A few months earlier she had given Shannon a well-worn booklet with a daisy on the cover, titled
Now You’re a Woman,
and had sent her into the yellow bathroom to read it behind the locked door. Once she’d finished, Shannon handed it back to Mom, who had joined her in the bathroom. Mom must’ve thought the booklet adequately addressed the essentials of womanhood; they did not further discuss what being a woman now meant, but how to conceal it. She showed Shannon how to put together a menstrual belt; gave her a can of FDS feminine deodorant spray; and instructed her to deposit spotted underwear or bedsheets directly into the washing machine, never to leave them in the bathroom hamper.

They should’ve made a daisy-covered booklet for boys, one with just enough answers to help a brother help a scared sister. As Shannon opened up to me, I felt as if I were scrambling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover to the box. It was clear that Shannon was bleeding, that she would keep bleeding for an entire week, and that there was no way to stop it. No wonder she looked so fearful. I, too, was frightened. I was also sworn to secrecy. Had I gone to Mom or Dad, I’d have gotten Shannon into trouble. Our mother had given her two last instructions: “Don’t tell Dad. And don’t tell Bill.”

On some level I must’ve trusted that my mother knew what she was doing with Shannon, but at the time she just seemed mean. If told then what I know now, I’d have been far more rattled. From an anthropological point of view, my mom’s exacting this final vow from Shannon was simply a modern instance of an age-old custom: secluding menstruating women and girls. In practice, secrecy is seclusion through silence, a wall built around a girl at menarche, her first period, that remains standing today, to some degree, in homes throughout the world. In a broader context, however, 1971 Spokane was a pinnacle of enlightenment compared with almost anywhere, say, a hundred years prior.