Every physician, nurse and allied clinical professional has to come to terms with blood. It’s just part of the landscape of our disciplines. We respond to its spillage. We draw it from the bodies of those in our care. We try to control its wastage during surgeries. We analyze it in our laboratory machines so that it can guide our clinical decisions. We even feel it rushing into our own faces during moments of duress, as we also see it in the faces of our patients when we ask an embarrassing question. That’s the nature of blood.
In this house, as probably in yours, blood is most often a phenomenon of accident. It is manifest by a cut, a scratch, an injury or some other mishap. A few weeks ago, Susan noticed blood stains on the porcelain tiles of our kitchen. We struggled to figure out their origin.
Had we prepared or eaten a rare piece of meat and dribbled its blood on the floor? That sometimes happens when I cook beef tongue. Had one of the kittens suffered a paw injury that left a trail of blood behind her? Did one of us experience a foot injury that left our life essence on the kitchen floor?
It took a while to sort it out. After a while, Susan realized that on her way to the kitchen to feed our juvenile felids that morning, Maia had encircled her ankle with paws whose exposed claws had caused sufficient injury to draw blood. It reminded me of a riddle posed to our fifth grader by his teacher who asked, “What is the difference between a cat and a comma?” The answer was, “In the cat, the claws precede the paws.”
This morning, I walked out into the kitchen to rewarm my coffee. On the dining room floor, I saw streaks of dried red – Blood. I walked back to the bedroom. Maia had been in bed, curled up between my legs, for hours. Kedi had been quietly asleep underneath the bed. Susan said that she had a cracked callus on her foot, and that perhaps was the source of the blood. I shook my head and suggested that an appointment with the podiatrist might be in order.
The hours passed. In the evening, it occurred to me that the “blood stains” were quite brightly red. Blood with just a bit of time, turns brown. Yes, I hadn’t cleaned up the stains. Sometimes it is better to leave things alone until we understand them.
Last night, Kedi and Maia had gotten up on the dining room table and dragged off the remnant of a Chinese dinner that included a BBQ pork rib that was drenched in Sweet and Sour sauce. Yes, it was sweet, sticky, and bright red. The “blood” on the dining room floor tiles was the sweet and sour sauce coating the rib bone that the kittens had dragged off the table.
The blood in our story, like so many things in our lives was not what it appeared to be.