I'm Bleeding

I'm bleeding. Seriously. As I write this, my arm is emitting a stream of the red groovy, as Alex might say. I find it fascinating and somehow life-affirming to sit here and bleed.

I've done a lot of bleeding in the last few years, but it was always for some grim medical reason. When I was preparing for my stem cell transplant, I had to sit connected to an apheresis machine for about ten cumulative hours. They draw blood out of one tube, run it through a machine, take out what they want, and pump it back in through a different tube. I think they said my entirely volume of blood was run through the machine sixteen times over.

That's a lot of bleeding. Granted, it didn't end up pooled on the floor or splattered on the wall for some CSI geek to ponder, but still, it's an interesting state of mind to sit there for about thirty minutes and think "I would have bled to death by now if the machine wasn't pumping it back in."

I bled when they put the tubes in. I bled when they took the tubes out. During the lethal-dose chemo, I bled continuously from my nose and lips because my blood simply wouldn't clot, at all. Every needle stick bled for five minutes, and every time I bumped into anything, masses of pooled blood formed under my skin. And I bled copiously during my bone marrow biopsies (I seem to remember someone saying "It's a gusher" during one procedure, and I never seemed to emerge from them without dried blood and Betadine all over me).

But this is different. I was bleeding because I'd stupidly gouged myself while cutting a huge limb off a tree. It wasn't for some grim medical purpose driven by some dire diagnosis; I was just cutting a limb off a tree because the tree would be better off without it. No cancer, no chemo, no nausea, just me and the saw and the tree, and the notion that I was just being a regular guy again, doing what had to be done for the good of everyone involved.

And I'll bleed for that. Sure.