On blood

Last night I gave blood. It took a while for the Red Cross to find me again after my cross-country move, but they did, and I dutifully showed up. Actually I’m lying about the duty part, I was grateful to show up. Giving blood is a free anonymous no-fuss bimonthly HIV test, and I had missed at least three opportunities since I left Ontario.

One evening when I was still living down the block from Hess Village, I was throwing a dinner party, the last one from an extended era of exclusively vegetarian cooking. The guests included several harried general internists who arrived late, an adulterous couple of political scientists who spent most of the evening necking and smoking on the wee balcony, and one extremely arrogant health economist with washboard posture and at least seven profound horizontal forehead wrinkles. I had given blood before the party in the medical centre where I was then studying and working, and the wine was rushing to fill in the gaps of liquid in my veins.

Because long ago and for a long time I loved a man with a Southern African passport, I always have to correct the nurse when she routinely fills in the No bubble before finishing asking whether I have slept with anyone who has lived in Africa since 1977. They always look up the exact country an African sex partner is from. They always announce me No Risk, even though as an epidemiology student (frankly, as someone who had studied math, ever) I knew very well if you wanted some risk, go sleep around (directly or indirectly) where prevalence is at 20-40%. I wondered why they asked this question if it didn’t really matter, when frankly, maybe it kind of should?

HIV testing is a fascinating subject for the amateur bioethicist, and the health economist in the room presumed himself to be one. He argued they should take the blood, test the blood, and if it is clean, use the blood. They do obviously test all the blood anyhow. Why gum up the donation process with fifty questions? Why the long judgmental stare when you concede that yeah, ugh, I sort of kind of slept with an African? Or god forbid, a half dozen of them?

The doctors in the house scoffed and retorted it’s a process of risk reduction, it is a standard approach. That’s why gay men and Africans and mad cow eaters and Accutane users can’t donate- to improve efficiency, and also, public faith in the system. But honestly now, doesn’t that just make you worry that the Red Cross testing techniques might be highly mediocre?

Just in case anybody gets the wrong idea- I do not think that about the Red Cross.

What I have come to think is that the blood clinic’s cubicle nursing station is a secular confessional.

“Have you ever had sex with a man who had sex with a man?”
“Have you ever had sex with someone who paid money or drugs for sex?”

And a reminder too of our secular uncertainties, our sexual agnosticism. Because Nurse Betty, some things I just don’t know.