Blood

Working at my family’s hockey rink during my college years, I got to see a lot of blood, most of it from superficial cuts to the face that looked gory until cleaned up. Though I never had even a basic first-aid course, I got so good at applying bandages that players often told me later how much the emergency-room staff had admired my work.

No matter how much blood I had to wipe off a hockey player, it never really got to me. I wasn’t one to fall apart so easily. But then my dad would walk into the office with a cut for me to dress. He would sit down on the worn wooden bench, his face and hands covered in oil from having worked in the compressor room all day, and show me a gash on his hand or arm. He had probably injured himself hours earlier, but he would always wait until the job was finished before he would ask me to patch him up. The sight of just a drop of his blood made me tremble. Bloody hockey players were a dime a dozen, but I had only one dad. 

Kathy L. Abbott
Beverly, Massachusetts

I was twelve when I started menstruating. I stared at the bloodstained toilet paper in disbelief, then searched in vain for the blue box that my mother had pointed out to me on the bathroom shelf months before.

When I couldn’t locate the box, I went to my dresser drawer for the kit the nuns had handed out after we’d watched the grainy filmstrip in the sixth grade. I found the elastic sanitary-napkin belt, but the lone pad that had come with it was long gone. I’d practiced putting it on so many times that the ends had torn, and I’d discarded it. I stood there holding the stretchy belt with nothing to attach to it, sticky blood between my legs. Then I ran to find my mother.

She was outside smoking a cigarette and having a rare moment of solitude in front of the chicken coop.

“I got my period,” I blurted out.

“Oh!” she cried, blushing.

“I can’t find any pads.”

She jumped up and went into the house, where she dug through the bag of rags she kept on a hook.

“You’ll have to use a rag, just like I did as a girl,” she said.

I was mortified. How could I wear a bulky rag held in place with safety pins?

In the bathroom I stood rigid as my mother pulled down my bloodstained cotton underpants, knelt in front of me, and attached the pins to each side of the folded rag. The top of her head brushed against my pubic hair as she stood up. “When you change the rag,” she said, “rinse it out in the sink, and put it in the wash basket. I’ll buy you some pads as soon as I can.”

If it had been up to me, I’d have buried the used rag deep in the trash, but my mother never wasted anything.

For two days I was excused from chores, and I sat around reading books and feeling as though I had a pillow between my legs. Later I overheard my mother whispering to my father that the reason there were no pads on the shelf that day was that they couldn’t afford them. My mom had been using rags herself to save a few dollars.

The thought of my mother wearing rags during her own periods so that I could have store-bought pads made me want to help. I started saving my baby-sitting money to buy boxes of sanitary napkins, which I left where I hoped my mother would see them, so she would use them, too.

Mary Potter Kenyon
Manchester, Iowa

I came back from Latin America with some kind of illness. Since I was broke, I went to the local free clinic, where I’d worked as a home-health aide, helping people with late-stage aids to die with dignity. (In 1993 a dignified death was about all we could offer.)

Before the clinic nurse drew my blood, she asked if I wanted to be tested for hiv. I agreed, though I didn’t think I needed to be tested; I’d been negative the last time and had had only safe sex since then.

A week later I came back for the test results. I knew something was up when they ushered me into a quiet room with a solemn-faced counselor. He told me I was hiv-positive.

I was silent for a long time as I tried to figure out who might have infected me. I’d had a few fleeting encounters, but they’d all been safe. There was one man who’d kept buying me drinks and then convinced me to go home with him. We’d had protected sex, and I’d spent the night. I’d been really drunk; maybe I’d blacked out and he’d taken advantage of me.

The counselor accompanied me to make a follow-up appointment, and then he left me with a handshake and a wan smile of commiseration. It was a smile I would see a lot.

I spent the next few hours wandering around a bookstore, looking for self-help books about living with hiv. Instead I picked up a volume of Anne Sexton’s collected poems. I remembered having read her The Awful Rowing toward God while I’d been studying to be a Catholic priest. Doubting God had been my guilty pleasure back then. Standing in the bookstore, I read: “God went out of me / as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, / as if the sun became a latrine.” I was now in that boat with Sexton, and my doubt turned to fury: Why had God done this to me? I had been a Catholic Worker, gone to jail for peace, taken care of aids patients. What kind of cruel joke was this? Was it because I had left seminary? Was it because I was gay?

I spent the night with a friend who had worked at the clinic with me. When I arrived at his house, he and his male lover held me for a long time while I cried. They invited me into their bed that night — not for sex, just for closeness — and I lay with them for a while but couldn’t sleep, so I moved to the couch. My days of sleeping with other people were over, I thought.

The next week I returned to the clinic for my follow-up appointment and a second blood test. The nurse dropped the vial of blood and wiped up the spill with some water and bleach. The fumes made me nauseous, and when he stuck me the second time, I fainted. I came out of it shaking and sweating and thinking that this was what I would have to face for the rest of my short life: constant needle sticks, clumsy nurses, the reek of bleach, and coming out of faints covered in sweat.

Another two weeks later I was back at the clinic for the results. The receptionist sent me to the office of the medical director, who knew me. I felt ashamed: Shouldn’t I have known better? How could I have been so reckless? But the medical director’s eyes showed no judgment, only concern and some other emotion I couldn’t read.

“I have some unfortunate news,” she said, then quickly added, “but good news for you.” She told me I was not hiv-positive after all; the test result had been a false positive. She apologized, saying it was an incredibly rare occurrence. From her manner, I guessed she thought I might sue the clinic. But I was jubilant. I had been released from my death sentence. At the same time I realized that many others, equally innocent, still had to serve theirs.

Joseph Byrne
Washington, D.C.

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