Blood Work
Blood Work is an essay that confronts the writer's fraught past as a young Jehovah's Witness when a health issue throws her relationships to education, authority, and her own body into question.
I was at the rec center in Maryland, where my sister played on the big kids side. I know I must have been five because my dad was alive, and Maryland is one of the alive states. (The dead states: California, then Georgia, then everywhere else.) My best friend, a blonde little white girl. Ashley? Emily? Rachel? Anyway, AshleyEmilyRachel and me, outside, I think. Bright blue, chain links, my green t-shirt. A dare. I kissed her the innocent way kids kiss, a little peck on the lips. Then, running off, away from each other. Were there other kids there? I went to the bathroom and hid under the 90s-puke-pink countertops. I wept. My sister came in and found me, asked me what happened, asked why I was crying. "I don't want anyone to think I'm gay," I remember telling her. I don't remember when I learned the word gay. But the shame of it, the feeling of a fire sucking all the oxygen from inside me—that stayed, and it grew with me as I grew. We moved to Fort Irwin, California, where my father died suddenly in a military training accident, and then there was a grief drive: 24 hours straight across the country to Savannah, where my mother’s family still lives. Did she look over at the passenger’s seat in our Isuzu Trooper, remembering a man who’d sat there only weeks before? I imagine I slept most of the way. I imagine the drive drove my mother to pray.
~+~
In Maryland, I had been fairly indistinguishable from the other kids. Yes, my family occasionally went to the nearest Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses all together, but it wasn’t a serious aspect of our lives. My Christian education started in earnest after we moved to Savannah, as soon as I could read polysyllabic words. There were short magazines just for kids like me: one called School and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and another one in 1988 technicolor that I don’t remember the name of some 25 years gone. They were illustrated in the Witness house style of thick contour lines and amateurish shading, acrylic values harsh against each other. I received the magazines as a pair, and since I was old enough to walk into the school on my own and my mother wasn’t a practicing Witness at the time, I was responsible for delivering these brochures to my teachers. My first day of third grade, I My language was stilted the first few years, hewing too close to the script–Hello, my name is Natalie and I’m studying to become one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t believe in saluting the flag or celebrating holidays, so I can’t participate in those activities. I stayed seated when everyone rose to chant at the flag. I went to the library when a Christmas movie went on at the end of the second nine weeks. I politely declined the birthday cupcakes my classmates brought until eventually, the other kids stopped offering. Because I lived in a religious part of the country, all of this was pretty well-received. I read experiences in the Watchtower magazines of kids who got bullied for their beliefs, pushed around despite their pacifism and passivity, and I felt grateful not to be in their situation. At the same time, I wished for a little more challenge, some circumstance that would force me to prove the strength of my convictions. Actual physical danger, not just emotional or spiritual danger. I wondered quietly whether it would help me believe. Meanwhile, I tried to appreciate my burgeoning Bible knowledge as inoculation against the world’s ills even though it felt like a vaccine administered with an old needle.
Just over a decade later, in my first year of college, I stood in a line of students ready to hurl angry questions at John Marks, the ex-Evangelical-turned-atheist author of the 2010 campus read, Reasons to Believe: One Man’s Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind. The campus read program at my university assigned a book to all the incoming freshmen, and more often than not, brought the author to speak and respond. I I had been raised not to participate in politics in accordance with Witness doctrine, but pushback to atheism was the sole area where I could make it known that I was a true Christian. For one night, denomination didn’t separate me from the other students at my small Georgia university. We were united in our indignation, though I couldn’t tell you now what about the book offended me; I didn’t even finish reading it. As each querent in the aisles drew nearer to the microphones, I fixed my gaze on the pale man, a symbol of this wicked system’s sickness, at the front of the auditorium. This is it, I thought to myself. The danger. But just as quickly as the opportunity to confront a worldly authority had arisen, it was over. I was five people from the front of the line—not even close.
~+~
Perhaps the most influential book for young Witness children is called My Book of Bible Stories. The hardcover edition I grew up with is shiny goldenrod with the book’s title impressed in sanguine foil script on the front and spine. It’s illustrated cover-to-cover, full of large, serif text retellings of the most important myths for indoctrination. I remember looking at the depiction of Dinah after she’d been raped by Shechem, her Canaanite crush. She lies on the ground, distraught, as Shechem leaves the tent beneath an azure affront of sky. Her brothers will have to kill him now, this rendition makes clear, and she could have avoided the entire situation in the first place if she’d just stayed out of the land of Canaan as Jehovah had commanded her people. It’s discomfiting now that I understand how impossible it can be to escape a man hell-bent on having you, but it explains plenty about my feelings towards women in my youth–that they were sluts, that they deserved what was coming to them, that if I couldn’t wrangle the things that made me like them, I’d deserve my demise too.
Through stories like that one and others, I learned about bloodguilt before I’d even started bleeding myself. Among Witnesses, as with most proselytization-oriented strains of Christianity, bloodguilt carries a great deal of significance. If the world is ending tomorrow, righteous fire raining from the sky, God’s judgment borne out in unburied bodies littering the streets—if only you and 8 million other people, less than 1% of the world’s total population, will be saved to inherit a paradise Earth, meaning the vast majority of humanity is ripe for destruction—if you really believe that all of that is going to happen, you would be as good as killing the 99% yourself if you didn’t preach the Truth to them. For us, preaching was one of the works that made clear your faith’s vitality. For me, that requirement turned all friendships and relationships outside the faith into swollen possibilities. Looking into the faces of my girl best friends or the boys I liked to joke around with in class, I saw their eyes inscribed with their epitaphs.
In this and countless other ways, high-control groups train you to engender your own isolation. This has the twofold purpose of making you easier to manipulate while you’re in, less likely to survive—whether by your own hand or through sheer lack of access to community resources and the hugs that haunt your memory—once you’re out. Even after—even if—you escape, you will find yourself justifying the means: that you deserved the threat of having everything ripped away from you, that your sinful heart is indicative of a need for harsher punishment, that you are unworthy of the aftercare of the Divine. It’s all very business-formal-Jesus-cum-Christian-Grey.
~+~
When I first started my period as a nine-year-old, it was gross and brown, but manageable. By sixth grade, my whole life felt dictated by the seven days of bleeding that punctuated every month. I'd wake up sticky and stinking at 6 in the morning, soiling yet another pair of the multipack Hanes underwear whose elastic I’d been stretching out since I was eight. At school, I'd dutifully copy Latin roots for 40 minutes only to rise and see a deep red blot on the beige seat beneath me. I started wearing a dark-colored jacket to school every day, sweating down my sides all fall and spring and summer, in case I needed to tie it around my waist and conceal the horrifying way my body burst forth from below. Once, in seventh grade, I was able to borrow a spare pair of American Eagle jeans from a friend, but by the following nine-week term my thighs and butt had begun to muscle. I had clocked the divergent shapes my group of white girl friends and I were growing into. It didn't take long to figure out that AE didn't make jeans for “gams,” as my mom had called them, laughing while she playfully smacked one of my thickening thighs. My legs, long and strong, have always been my favorite part of my body, their meeting point my greatest shame. I wasn't allowed to use tampons, so I asked for larger pads. They made no difference. When I would finally make it home and tell my mom about my day, blushing, bloody, and embarrassed at my inability to stay clean, she'd say the same thing every time: “You have to take better care of yourself.”
~+~
When I was 14, I decided to get baptized. Witness Baptisms are incredibly public, particularly when you’re in a small group. My mom let me borrow her one-piece, modest bathing suit and a pair of board shorts for the occasion. Prior to approval for baptism, candidates must meet with a pair of elders to go over a battery of questions assessing their readiness to join the flock. It’s usually a couple of meetings, one to two hours apiece depending on how long you take to answer. The questions are wide-ranging, from hyper-specific interpretations of Biblical doctrine to various Witness idiosyncrasies, but it’s basically open book. I had always been an excellent student; the oral test was barely a barrier to me.
On the day of my baptism in December 2007, a few days after my 15th birthday, I sat alongside two other baptismal candidates in the front two rows of the Ware County Middle School auditorium we were using for the Circuit Assembly. At the end of the baptismal talk, we rose to our feet as directed. Like all Witnesses baptized between mid-1985 and 2019, we were asked two questions from the podium: “On the basis of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, have you repented of your sins and dedicated yourself to Jehovah to do his will?”
“Yes!” we called in unison.
“Do you understand that your dedication and baptism identify you as one of Jehovah's Witnesses in association with God's spirit-directed organization?”
“Yes!” we cried again. The assembly attendees in the auditorium behind us burst into applause. I remember my hands quivering as we walked toward the school’s side yard where a baptismal pool was waiting; whether I trembled with joy or with anxiety, I am unsure. I kept meticulous notes during talks but editorialized in my cult voice, a veneer of righteousness capping the cracks in my belief.
Earlier that year, after I’d had sex for the first time, I’d stopped dating my journal entries. I deliberately transformed my handwriting from sharp print points to tight, tiny cursive, as though changing my script could change who I was as a person. By the time the Circuit Assembly rolled around, I had largely stopped writing anything at all. I had fornicated, confessed, and been forgiven. Baptism presented a bigger pad to catch the blood of Jesus once it washed me clean.
We exited the auditorium stage door and descended a flight of silver stairs, each waiting for our turn to be dunked in the water. My mom and my Bible study teacher stood at the landing at the top of the stairs, watching me from above. When the brother handling the baptisms brought me back up, my mom snapped a picture with a disposable camera. In it, I am smiling and looking up at the midday light peeking through the winter clouds. The way the sun hits my soaked hair, it looks like the holy spirit is wrapped up in my curls. I can’t blame my mom for feeling, as she told me later, like she was watching me receive a gift from Jehovah himself.
~+~
If My Book of Bible Stories was the defining text of a Witness childhood, Questions Young People Ask—Answers That Work! was the book that colored our teen years. Anticipating the inevitable questions of its members who were approaching adulthood, the organization re-released Questions Young People Ask—Answers That Work! Volume 1, an updated and revised version of the original text, the year after I graduated from high school. First published in 1989, the book structures each chapter as a question, featuring teen classic topics like “Why Say No to Drugs?” and “Should I Quit School?” and “How Can I Cope with Peer Pressure?” The new 2011 edition added more modern topics: “Am I Addicted to Electronic Games?” “How Can I Protect Myself from Sexual Predators?” and “How Can I Explain the Bible’s View of Homosexuality?” In Volume 2, confusingly released a few years prior to the 2011 edition, the Governing Body had grown more forceful in its denunciation of worldly mores. Homosexuality hadn’t even received a chapter in the 1989 edition of Young People Ask, but now both new volumes minced no words about Jehovah’s opinion of queer people as interpreted by the Governing Body. “How Can I Avoid Homosexuality?” asked Volume 2.
I had already had abiding crushes on other girls after AshleyEmilyRachel, though I rarely characterized them that way: when I was 15, my summer camp best friend Andrea and I would sit on her top bunk listening to The College Dropout and Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool on a little pink iPod as night fell, a pair of white wired earbuds split between us. I joked that she was my “musical soulmate,” glossing over the way I barely breathed when our heads were near each other or the sweat that slicked my back when I finally returned to my own room for curfew. At 16, wandering the halls with my school homie Vanessa and sneaking MySpace pictures in the bathroom of the school where Georgia held statewide competitions in the arts and humanities, I attributed my excitement to the novelty and adventure of being away from my overbearing mom. For the occasion, I wore the sash of a skirt as a headband, a barrette I’d repurposed into earrings, and a black polo shirt that almost gave me boobs.
In neither case did we ever cross a physical boundary. The main reason I had never kissed another girl was because, as far as I knew, none of the ones I liked felt the same feelings for me. That was probably for the best. In the back of my mind, I recalled the first page of the “How Can I Avoid Homosexuality?” chapter. “But what if you feel attracted to a member of the same sex? Does this automatically mean that you’re a homosexual? No. Remember, you’re in ‘the bloom of youth,’ a period when you’re subject to involuntary sexual arousal. (1 Corinthians 7:36) If at times you feel an attraction to a member of the same sex, be assured that this doesn’t mean that you’re gay. Such inclinations usually fade with time. Meanwhile, you must keep from getting involved in homosexual practices.” Maybe queerness was in my blood, as unavoidable as whatever determined the color of my eyes or the shape of my body. The little thrill I felt while holding a girl’s hand certainly felt like slipping into a perfect pair of jeans. Even so, I would have to fight to overcome those wicked feelings. The Young People Ask book left no room for uncertainty, suggesting, “Of course, some claim that there’s no point in doing all this, that you should simply ‘embrace your sexuality’ and ‘accept who you are.’ But the Bible says that you can do better than that! It tells us, for example, that some early Christians who had formerly practiced homosexuality changed.”
Despite my best efforts to cling to an internally harmonious self, I was changing all the time. I was horny and hormonal, a tense ball of desire. Maybe all this gay stuff would subside on its own if I ignored it. Figuring it beat the homosexual alternative, I pursued and discarded worldly boys whom I’d make out with between classes and pretend were strangers to me in public. I substituted the pleasure of being wanted for the pleasure of being fulfilled. In private, I hoped to die before I was once again overtaken by the cruel temptation of sexual sin.
~+~
If you asked me for advice about getting close to an ex-Jehovah’s Witness, I’d tell you to ask more questions. When did you leave? Why did you leave? What’s your relationship like with your family? Better questions. What are your thoughts on the Resurrection? Do you ever feel the desire to go to the Hall? Would you want your kids to believe one way or another? You’re playing Minesweeper on an old Compaq. Move slowly. It’s a game with no magic, no blood, no sound. Plant a flag at each answer, proceeding the only way you know how. Keep walking and count your paces.
The problem with loving someone fresh out from the thrall of dogma is that there is a series of tripwires you can’t see. You’ll hear people talk about the sense of being unable to think for themselves when they leave a high-control group, and in some ways, it’s true–I let a faith take hold of my tongue and twist it to its own ends. Sure, they’d caught me young and pliable, but what kind of a fool lets herself get tangled up with a cult? For years after I left, I couldn’t even say simple Disney movie phrases like “follow your heart” without hearing a jeremiad over the faint rumble of man’s fall. Why should you trust me when I don’t?
~+~
What trips me out the most now is how much evangelists are just salespeople. I look back at the Witness-published books that used to set my standards for appearance, for public speaking, for quality assurance, and I see their methods for what they are: the tactics of a door-to-door Cutco knives salesman or the pink-vehicled Mary Kay lady up the block. Reasoning from the Scriptures taught us how to “overcome conversation stoppers” like “I’m not interested” or “We are already Christians here,” which is to say, make a hard sell. From the Benefit from Theocratic Ministry School Education book we learned to speak clearly, to make it known exactly why our God was the best God by making it seem like a householder couldn’t live without this latest issue of the Watchtower. It’s free; what do you have to lose? Sometimes I flick my old house-to-house voice on as a party trick. Hi, my name is Natalie and I’m out today talking to my neighbors about peace. What do you think is necessary for humans to truly live in peace with one another? The question is a rhetorical gambit, some broad social problem or another to make you drop your guard before I shoehorn in a Bible quote and the lead line from one of that month’s magazines. I let the householder arrive, through inference, at my real conclusion: Come with me to the certain future where Christ rules and nobody dies. And I was masterful, from my teen years on. I adopted the constant placid smile of a Christian who loves to obey and knows she’ll be spared when Armageddon comes.
The other secret to high-control group recruitment is timing. People express confusion that folks with “smart” jobs, or at least powerful ones, choose to join the Witnesses. But JWs are nothing if not patient: you could visit someone and talk to them about the Bible for years before you happened to catch them in one of life’s upheavals. Sick spouses, job losses, economic downturns, civil unrest, chronic loneliness–the reason someone finally became serious about their interest in the Truth didn’t matter very much in the long run. You just needed to be present to catch them. Amongst ourselves, we cited Matthew 4:19 often; we were “fishers of men” baiting our hooks with hope.
~+~
There’s a common misconception among non-members that going to the doctor is against Witness doctrine, but that isn’t true. The Governing Body, the eight men in New York who oversaw the entire organization and had final say on Witness exegesis, didn’t put restrictions on all modern medicine. What’s really out of bounds are specific procedures: whole blood transfusions and blood parts like plasma and platelets are out, but interferons and dialysis are okay through a convoluted interpretation of Genesis 9:3-4 that allows you to supplement or filter and re-receive your own blood. White blood cells are out, but organ transplants are acceptable. A particularly manipulative illustration in several Witness publications conflates blood transfusions with alcohol consumption. “If a doctor were to tell you to abstain from alcohol, would that simply mean that you should not take it through your mouth but that you could transfuse it directly into your veins? Of course not! So, too, ‘abstaining from blood’ means not taking it into your body at all,” intones the June 1, 1969 issue of the Watchtower magazine. I read the same illustration in What Does the Bible Really Teach?, the foundational teaching text for Witnesses who studied to be baptized into the faith between 2014 and 2021.
As kids growing up in the Truth, we were taught in no uncertain terms to prepare to make a “mature decision” if presented with a life or death choice, even if our parents weren’t there to communicate on our behalf. There were videos and pictures in the magazines as well as whole brochures praising martyrs my age, low-dpi last images of smiling children with tubes up their noses. As a teenager, I’d wait at the Kingdom Hall literature counter for the congregation’s new shipment of NO BLOOD cards, the little quarter-fold advance directive cards Witnesses carried to indicate that if it came down to a split-second inpatient decision, we would rather die than defy. A few people had them laminated so the card couldn’t be tampered with if some conniving family member or doctor decided to try and save their life. We studied the distinctions during the weekly meetings; Our Kingdom Ministry, a publication that detailed the foci of the preaching work each month, had a full-page insert going over which parts of human biology were off-limits and which were simply “matters of conscience.” I knew that certain “matters of conscience” could still result in a hit to your reputation, and the line between “bad reputation” and “bad associations spoil useful habits” was the length of a lancet.
Despite my precociousness, I didn’t fully grasp what an advance directive was back then, that it wasn’t just something distributed to you by the elders and could, in fact, involve care choices based on your informed consent. I also didn’t really care much what going out would look like for me. I hoped it would be quick, of course–who wants to die slow?–but I hadn’t conceptualized the particulars. My death, like my life, was meant to be a witness to the one true god. In a millennial, apocalyptic cult, everything comes back to an impending end that only a select few have the favor of interpreting. At times, the tendrils of power extended beyond that handful of men on the Governing Body: it was the elder you trusted most, or the firm-handed circuit overseer, or a parent enforcing “the Truth” with a belt.
So it doesn’t really surprise me that this is maybe the first time in nearly 30 years that I haven’t felt ready for my life to end. It’s not just for logistical reasons, some sense of people or animals or plants needing me, though I’ve completed enough intake questionnaires to know those are “protective factors” that I have in my life now. More so than at any point when I was a person of faith, I have a deep well of hope and happiness that I’m here. I look back at my child self, teen self, young adult self, obsessed with dying and being made perfect, and it’s hard not to condescend. But a friend tells me that there’s wisdom in my child self, and I think they’re right. I keep trying to retroactively prove that I’ve grown from my naiveté, swatting away my old tastes. I’m refined now. I can smell the salt in the water when I cook and I know how to taste as I go instead of just forging blindly ahead with every recipe, hoping it yields the right results. Deep down, though, I know that it’s just cheaper to shut down old states of being instead of investigating why I became what I was. Balancing truth and grace when you’re not practiced at it can be emotionally expensive.
~+~
In meditation, I meet 21-year-old me for the first time and she’s in my childhood bed, wrapped in the plum-colored comforter I had as a teenager. She was trapped in the gym on post for a long time, and I was trying to remember what about that space felt so sticky until it struck me: 21 was the year I always needed to have a reason to go outside. There’s a lot of backstory leading up to my disfellowshipping at 21, but it’s not like my faith fell away from me all at once. Even if it had, the material constraints of living with family were still present. I moved back in with my mom, stepdad, and younger stepbrother after college because I had nowhere else to go. I wasn’t ready to be fully on my own despite my independent streak, my fantasies of dyeing my hair wild colors and inking shapes into my skin. And so, my room was both a port and a prison, and the only way I could leave was with a very good reason. Friends were not a good enough reason to pass muster with the family I was trying to prove my faithfulness to, but exercise was. Sure, I’d been distance running for eight years by the time I was 21, something I could do anywhere, but I wanted to do bodyweight exercises in an open space where I didn’t have to worry about offending my Witness mother by being in the same room as her. More accurately, I was her wound. I wasn’t sure if seeing me would demystify the hurt or intensify it, and I couldn’t bear the answer. So I stayed out of sight as much as I could.
The gym was a campsite in the wilderness of my solitude. I’d listen to Drake and give myself brief moments of experiencing my body, like I’d done on clandestine nights on dance floors in college. I wanted to feel sexy and sore and alive, muscular, sweaty. I wanted to feel pain with moderate safety. I wanted to be one of those girls Drake whisked away and serenaded even though I didn’t have the face or the ass for it. I wanted to escape as desperately as I needed to stay, unable to conceive of a life alone.
~+~
More than a decade later, I stood with my spouse at the main stage of a Pride festival in our city, thousands of miles from my hometown. Leftist activists confronted the crowd that many of us trans and queer folk had gathered into in solidarity with them. “Existence isn’t resistance,” a woman shouted from the stage. “Resistance is resistance!” After: chanting, interruption, marching, and invitations to the reveling throngs to spill into the streets. Some cheered as the action passed them out of the park but stayed back with their friend groups, a sea of rainbow-branded corporate logos stretching back behind them. Beautifully, some others joined.
A little over an hour later, we walked back to the festival. It was a hot June day, but Halah and I had previously said we would check on the table for an org we’re both involved with. Minutes into our return to the park grounds, I noticed that all sound was suddenly muzzled, a mute in the trumpet of the crowd. This actually happens to me quite a lot, but I usually just take a deep breath and stay inconspicuous, waiting for the accompanying dizziness to pass.
Two hours after the first wave of fog, after lying on the ground and my partner's lap and being generally unwell in public, we decided to call a medic. From there, the late afternoon heat was a haze of cold water dousings, lifts and laydowns, my partner’s worried face appearing between the concerned questions of strangers and a couple of creeps trying to take pictures up my dress. When my systolic blood pressure dropped to double digits again as I attempted to sit up, the medics called an ambulance to the hospital. I heard the words “near-syncopal,” “orthostatic”—my body couldn’t adjust to changes in its environment. The saline drip the medics had hooked up brought back my ability to crack dark jokes, but it wasn’t going to be sufficient to sustain me.
~+~
At first, my toes would just fall asleep as soon as I stepped outside on any late fall or early winter day. Sock thickness, shoe insulation, core warmth—all irrelevant. Within ten minutes, the second toes of both my feet would fall asleep, followed closely by one or both pinky toes. Then, index finger, middle finger. Eventually I stopped noticing the absence of sensation; I had things to do and places to be.
Over the years, especially as I slowed down on eating red meat, the numbness worsened. It would set in faster and take longer to resolve. Gloves and wool socks were as ineffective as ever. Then, the weather stopped mattering. I’d be taking a warm summer walk and notice that one of my fingers had gone white at the tip.
Even after I learned that anemia was likely the culprit behind all these symptoms, it was hard to make myself take the necessary iron supplement because iron supplements suck. Taken without vitamin C or enough water or any food, which were typically the only times I remembered the damn things, the pills were liable to have me retching in my tiny bathroom’s toilet within half an hour. I figured I could just deal with the minor annoyance of sleepy digits.
~+~
Around the corner from the hospital where I ended up, there’s a medspa where you can get a facial and an IV nutrient infusion in the same business. Intravenous imbibing is as common as brushing your teeth for some people. I, however, had never seen a blood transfusion done in person. I've never known anyone who’s had one (to my knowledge), and I'd certainly never considered having one myself.
“So, you’re anemic,” said the ER doctor. “What that means is, you don’t have enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to the rest of your body.” For some reason, no one had ever explained it to me so succinctly. Though I was a chronic web searcher of pretty much any other topic, I had never thought to investigate the consequences of untreated anemia. What was the worst that could happen? I didn’t look it up until I was discharged. As it turns out, quite a lot can happen, up to and including heart failure.
After stepping out briefly, the brown-haired ER doctor came back into my room to discuss my options. My blood count was well below the threshold of 14 that would trigger him to recommend a transfusion. He also mentioned intravenous iron as an option and laid out how each method would bolster my iron supply and red blood cell production: 2 to 3 months with the full transfusion, 6 to 8 weeks with just the iron infusion. I felt like I was swimming in viscous anxiety. How could any hemoglobin horology lighten the weight of this decision?
“Can I have a few minutes to talk it over with my spouse?” I asked him. All my prior medical decisions had been made by committee—my mother, a magazine, the Governing Body. I needed Halah, then. I could feel myself floating from the bed at the thought of lifelong consequences, the quiet landmines that could lie in wait in an anonymous stranger’s blood cells, all the propaganda I was taught about careless doctors doling out blood like band-aids.
The first attending nurse, a thin, middle-aged white woman whom I'd first mistaken as cold, offered me more information. “I didn't grow up in a way that allowed blood transfusions,” I said, my face shadowed by fatigue, hunger, and slowly creeping guilt.
“Jehovah Witness or something?” she asked, and I nodded, the conditioning flaring hot through my nostrils when I heard the absent possessive. It's “Jehovah’s,” I thought but didn't say. Medical professionals have long been aware of our—their—beliefs about accepting blood, the result of a decades-long campaign by groups of brothers around the world who went to inform local healthcare providers about the Witnesses’ medical restrictions. I had even participated in such a hospital visit myself, back when I was 19 and trying to dedicate 90 hours per month to evangelizing.
“People can believe whatever they believe,” the nurse said, and I feared for a moment that I'd gotten unlucky, like the time back in 2016 that I was trapped needle-deep in a phlebotomist's chair at the psychiatrist's office where I’d just been 1013’ed and the nurse said, “Give Jesus another try.” Like Jesus wasn't the reason I was going inpatient in the first place.
I snapped back to the present, where the masked woman was flushing the IV line hooked into my left arm. Saline splashed and bubbled through the long tube until only faint red fluid remained within it.
“But also, it's okay to do the thing you've always been told is wrong.”
~+~
My thoughts were a fine steel braid as a second nurse printed a bright red blood type bracelet; she snapped it around my wrist and scanned me into the computer like a grocery item. Last chance, a voice that was mine and not mine intoned while I watched the blood packet begin to drip. I knew that this moment wouldn’t materially change anything about my relationship to my former faith, to my family. The years of distance between us were long-hardened clay; I wouldn’t spill myself out to re-moisten it. Yet, this felt like a deeper affront to my old god, a wicked substance that would become part of me and couldn’t be released through shitting, sweating, or bloodletting. Context made a quagmire of my quality of life.
In moments where I’d imagined myself boldly standing for what was right, even if my life were on the line, I hadn’t envisioned letting it get this far. In my adolescent hospital fantasy where I’m approaching my last breath, the elders and my family, or at least my mom, were nearby to bolster me and express their pride. The blood bag would never have even entered the room.
Despite what the day’s experiences might otherwise suggest, I knew I was lucky. The medical staff abided my elementary questions with kindness and clarity, explaining the process by which blood was collected and cleaned for transfusions. Though I would receive a $1,350 ER bill with only half surprise a couple of months later, even that was a significant reduction from the $16,000 this much-needed care would have cost me without my gainful employment and health insurance. Witnesses don’t believe in luck. But I am not a Witness.
~+~
A week later, wearing a bright orange bra beneath a button-down shirt adorned with illustrated peaches, I enthused to my homie X, “I’m full of bloooood!” in a faux Dracula voice.
“What??” he asked me.
The funny voice had been a paper-thin excuse to tell someone the story of how I’d nearly passed out at Pride, ended up at the hospital, and found out that my blood count was 6.2. Some years back, one of the few gynecologists I’ve had and actually liked did call me repeatedly after routine blood tests to tell me, “You’re like, super anemic, dude,” but it was late 2020 and whatever the fuck my blood was doing felt like the least of my problems. I laughed through the story as I recounted it to X. He did not laugh along.
X and I had first met on the dance floor of some QTPOC Colorado event or another nearly ten years earlier, just as I was beginning grad school. We’d hit it off, goofy motherfuckers and wintertime orphans making warmth with one another by way of occasional hookups. He was dealing with family shit and I was mostly dissociated during sex, which never stopped me from seeking it out, but that particular confluence did mean that neither of us was probably having a very good time. Back in those days, I couldn't sit still or spend time with my thoughts without winding up crying on a public bus or curled into the fetal position. When my day was done on campus, I was looking for the party, and when the party ended, I was praying for an after hours.
We’ve both changed a lot since those days. I had been a listening ear for him a few times back then, but I doubt I was very forthcoming with my own emotional struggles. I’ve mostly stopped being the take-my-shirt-off-in-the-club girl. I haven’t blacked out from alcohol or taken unknown substances from overly friendly men’s palms in years. And now, I’d chosen to save my own life instead of following the blood in, blood out belief system I was sold as a child. Some of my laughter was because, yes, I think I’m a funny fucking storyteller, but some of those laughs were just surprised air escaping the first pressure valve I’d opened since getting discharged from the hospital.
After the transfusion, it took me weeks to mention to any of my other friends that I’d been hospitalized. I spent the Sunday after the procedure forcing myself to rest despite feeling the best I’d felt in recent memory, then I logged back into work on Monday like nothing had happened. I looked at the little Zoom tiles of my coworkers’ faces, debating the merits of talking about the fact of my blood, the fiction of my being. Who in this group, more than half of whom are Mormons, my millenarian cult cousins, would I even trust? How would I begin to explain that I was somersaulting between giddiness and rage, that my life hung in the balance of the lies I grew up on and my body was full of warm sunlight for the first time in years? I left my camera off and waited for each meeting to end. It only occurred to me months later that maybe I should have taken an extra day off.