Blood Read Free Page B

about one hundred trillion new platelets every day. Their function is to aid in recovery from injury. If something pierces a blood vessel, platelets stick to the damaged lining and clump together. This process aids in coagulation — a blood-thickening process that stops the body from bleeding. The clotting process begins within seconds of an injury. Standing on guard and ready to self-correct, your blood organizes itself to prevent a hemorrhage. Otherwise, copious amounts of blood could drain out of you. A simple puncture of the body, left unattended, could be fatal. You would be like a bicycle inner tube when the tire rolls over a nail, with no patching gear within reach. But your body has its own patching kit. It knows how to clot. A clot can be fatal in the wrong place and for the wrong reason: say, if it is travelling toward your lungs or brain. Then it is known as an embolism. But you want the clotting function to work perfectly and immediately when you nick yourself with a kitchen knife. To me, the platelet is the nurse or doctor in your veins, ever ready to sew you up when you have been shot.
    The bottom part of the imaginary tube of blood consists of red blood cells, also known as red corpuscles or erythrocytes. Round in shape and slightly concave on each side, they are the most numerous cells in the blood. Some five billion of them exist in one millilitre of blood. I think of the red blood cell as the cell of love. In contrast to the soldiering white blood cell, and the platelet with its emergency room services, the red blood cell is your bedmate. It is all about giving. The red blood cell lives for only 120 days, but what an ardent lover it is! You should salute your white blood cells and thank your platelets, but the red blood cell deserves your love. It kisses your cells with the gift of oxygen, and it is a non-stop kisser. Your body produces millions of red blood cells every second.
    In humans, the blood is red thanks to iron and hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein in the red blood cells. In its appearance, blood stands alone and virtually unmistakable. How often are you wrong when you think you see blood? Thanks to the presence of iron, which is also responsible for the rusty-red beaches of Prince Edward Island, blood is bright red. No other bodily fluid or tissue resembles it. I don’t often see the colour of arterial blood in nature. The closest I have seen to blood-red is a sunlit field of poppies. The sight of flowering poppies arrests me, every time. I have to stop and stare at it. I take in a breath, and never fail to think that the field before my eyes is beautiful. Silent under the skies, teased by the wind, it resembles a vast blanket of undulating blood.
    But even the colour of blood varies, slightly, and has led many people to wonder if it is blue when not exposed to oxygen. Blood is never blue in human beings, but given the way that light can strike fair-coloured skin, it can sometimes appear that way from outside the body. Indeed, the term blueblood , which means a person of noble ancestry, derives from the idea that the venous blood may seem to have a blue tint through the light skin of a person freed from the burden of having to work in the sun. Indeed, polo — a game of the very rich — is sometimes described as a blue-blooded sport. The “colour” of our blood is just one example of how we have uniquely attached meaning and metaphor to blood as a way of differentiating ourselves from others, in this particular instance as a marker of class superiority. Just as quickly as blood can elevate your status, it can denigrate you. A “bloody fool” is an idiot — perhaps dirty, and possibly blood-spattered. The “bloodthirsty masses” are the last thing from genteel. On the contrary, they have empty bellies and, lacking food, insist on violence.
    Much as some people have found it convenient and reassuring to imagine that their blood is so special that it