Blood by Lawrence Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

Although it can present in otherwise healthy individuals, it can lead to stupor, coma, organ failure, and death.
    Men just don’t have to think about these things. Many are proud to shed their blood in sport or war as a badge of courage and proof of devotion to a noble cause. But men do not have to consider how to deal with regular, healthy monthly bleedings. Jerry Seinfeld thought it was funny enough to crack this joke: “TV commercials now show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem.”
    The joke is custom-made for men, for whom blood in clothing often results from sport or war. But blood in clothing and laundry, for women, is a fact of life.
    WE HAVE TRAVELLED A LONG JOURNEY in coming to understand the way that blood works in bodies. The things we can do with blood seem nothing short of miraculous. We know how to withdraw it, how to break it into its main parts (red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and plasma) in a centrifuge. We store it safely and transport it around the world. We treat and analyze it to ensure that it is free of diseases. We carry out millions of transfusions each year around the planet. We employ dialysis to clean the blood of a person whose kidneys don’t work. We manufacture insulin and a variety of pills to help diabetics maintain acceptable levels of sugar in their blood. We have developed artificial blood-clotting products designed to prevent people from dying of bleeding disorders.
    But there are still countless ways that our blood can betray us. As much as our blood works to regulate itself and help repair or maintain the health of our bodies, it can also circumvent its own rules, turning on us in potentially lethal ways. We have bleeding problems such as hemophilia and von Willebrand disease, cancers of the blood or bone marrow such as leukemia and lymphomas, and disorders such as anemia and sickle-cell disease, in which blood fails to carry oxygen properly from the lungs to the rest of the body. Blood disorders affect millions of North Americans each year, straddling all boundaries of age, race, sex, and socio-economic status. In addition, we are facing an epidemic of diabetes, a disease manifested by a surplus of sugar in the blood. When sugar (or glucose) levels remain too high — either because the pancreas is not producing insulin or because the insulin is unable to do its proper job in controlling blood sugar levels — the body begins to break down. In the worst-case scenario, nerve endings fray, body extremities have to be amputated, organs begin to fail, and the patient dies.
    An exogenous agent can also corrupt blood. Your body doesn’t choose to break down, but a foreign visitor forces it to do so. This can take place through a variety of means, such as sex, blood transfusions, the use of infected needles, and mosquitoes.
    In 1989, I was working as a volunteer with Crossroads International in the landlocked country of Mali, in West Africa, when I became aware that I was sick, and nauseated, and feverish, and that my bones were aching terribly. How to describe the symptoms: it felt like the worst flu I’ve ever had. I had been faithfully taking Aralen, an anti-malarial prophylactic — the most awful-tasting pill I have ever put in my mouth, by the way — but it did not prevent me from acquiring malaria. It is possible, however, that it kept the disease from becoming fatal. I took refuge in the house of my good friends Francine and Pierre Baril in Bamako. I let them take care of me, and I believe I took some quinine. Other than that, I lay under a ceiling fan and drank lots of water and waited out the flu-like symptoms. They held me in their grip for about a week, and then they let go, and I recovered.
    Not every person is so lucky. The World Health Organization estimates that there were more than two hundred million cases of