the blood of others

david obuchowski

I wake up from what should have been a routine surgery to the news that instead of removing two inches of intestine, they took out 12 inches. And on top of that, an additional six inches in another spot. “I know it’s a lot more than we’d discussed, but it was borderline life threatening. The intestinal tissue had turned irrevocably to scar tissue. At any point, it could have caused a full obstruction, which could have led to serious complications, even a rupture.”

          I nod. I don’t know if the doctor is speaking in a strange fast-slow-fast cadence, or if it’s just the drugs in my system making it seem that way; either way, it’s giving me a vague seasick feeling. Now the doctor is saying something about how many incisions I have in my abdomen, and how some of them had to be much larger to accommodate the removal of the tissue. I fight the urge to close my eyes. It feels like hands are pulling me down into a warm, silent pit. But I know that whatever is being discussed is important.
I blink my eyes hard a few times to try to force myself awake, and now recognize the doctor as the guy who I’d met with the previous month for a consultation, who had come in and spoken to me earlier that day, who had wheeled my hospital bed from the pre-op room to the OR. 
          “Doctor Stanato!” I slur, as if he’s an old friend who I’ve just run into on the street.
          He nods. He’s well aware I’m still under the heavy influence of the sedation.
          “Unfortunately, there was another surprise,” he says. “You did suffer some fairly significant blood loss. There was quite a lot of bleeding cutting through the mesentery, and then removing those sections, we really struggled to get the bleeding under control. By the time we did, it was necessary to transfuse.”
          From the expression on his face, I can tell that he thinks I’m not understanding, but despite the irresistible draw of sleep and the push-pull-push rhythm of how Doctor Stanato appears to be speaking, I know exactly what he’s saying.
          “I got someone else’s blood?”
          “Yes. It was necessary.”
          “Now what?” I ask. 
          “Well, you can expect there to be an elevated level of pain. Also, you’ll notice that there’s going to be a lot of very unsightly bruising from the internal bleeding. But that’s temporary and almost entirely superficial. So you won’t want to let that upset you.”
          “Someone else’s blood?”
          “Not specifically another person. A matching type, though.”
          “How much was I in?”
          The doctor looks at me quizzically. “How much … what? I’m sorry, I don’t follow?”
          “Danger,” I say, chuckling at how I’d forgotten the most important word of the sentence.
          He exhales slowly. “Any surgery like this is dangerous. But it’s difficult to quantify. Importantly, you’ll make a complete recovery. There’s little doubt about that.”
          “But, this blood,” I start to say—but the hands of sleep have pulled me down into their womb-like pit, and I’m unconscious before I can finish whatever it was I’d intended to say.

I awake to a dark room and searing pain. To my left, there’s a window where I can see the soft orange and white glimmer of the city streetlights below my hospital room, which I estimate must be on something near the 10th floor. They stretch into the night, into the distance, as if they might run off forever to the edge of the Pacific…or the Atlantic—I have no idea what direction I’m looking in. My agony is so intense, I can’t so much as turn my body. But still the lights beckon, inviting me to go explore the vast expanses of the world outside the hospital.
          I try to take a breath, and it feels as if I’m being stabbed in the back, through my shoulders, through my chest. There are buttons on the insides of my hospital bed. Surely, one of them must be a nurse call button. I mash them all and the hospital bed begins to shift and reconfigure beneath me to the whine of electric motors. But a moment later, a nurse comes in, which tells me that, among others, I’ve managed to hit the button I was hoping for.
          “You’re awake?”
          “Help,” I whisper. “Help.”
          “Help with what? Do you feel sick? Do you need the bathroom? Do you need to stand up?”
          “Pain,” I manage to whisper, and then I cry out.
          From the countertop along the wall to my right, the nurse snatches a portable scanner, like the kind at a self-checkout station in a grocery store, and she scans a plastic bracelet on my left wrist. Then she punches in a code on a digital keypad mounted on the wall. An agreeable set of beeps lets her know that the code has been accepted, and she opens a door and pulls something from the inside of what looks to be some kind of safe.
          A moment later, she is injecting a fluid into the plastic tubing of my IV drip.
          “Sthat?” I manage to ask.
          “Dilaudid,” she says, and with the drug injected to the line, she looks up at me and smiles.
          For a moment, the pain vanishes. I know her face. “Amy,” I say.
          She smiles. 
          “Amy?” 
          “Feel better?” she asks me sweetly.
          “Amy,” I say as I try mightily to keep my eyes open.
          This is the woman who took my virginity, and whose virginity I claimed in exchange. But that was 30 years earlier and two thousand miles from here. 

We’d dated for three years—through most of high school. She was my first love. Like so many first loves, it was intense and immature, all lust and possessiveness. But we couldn’t keep away from each other. And then after three years, she became another first: my first terrible breakup. 
          She didn’t want to be tied down anymore. She wanted to go with her friends to parties and not worry about having a boyfriend. She wanted to spend her last year of high school hooking up. And, anyway, she’d argued: we’d both be going our separate ways to college. So why put off the inevitable?
          Me—I’d no idea we weren’t going to try to make it work long-distance after graduation. And the thought that she wanted to break up with me just so she could fuck around with random other people was enough to make me want to throw up, cry, or put my fist through a wall. Or maybe all three. 
          I refused to let her see my hurt. I granted the break up swiftly, as if I’d been excited to do it. But, privately, it tore me apart. One weekend when my parents went away, I sat on the floor with a bottle of Bacardi and a can of Coca Cola, gulping the former then chasing it with the latter. It was ten o’clock in the morning. I listened to “So Lonely” and “Can’t Stand Losing You” by the Police over and over and over and over again.                   After a couple hours, the booze and the music took its toll. I dialed her up on my gray cordless phone with its retractable antenna, and I begged her to come back. 
          “It’s not going to happen,” she told me. And then she hung up. But to prevent me from calling back, she must have left her phone off the hook because it was busy the rest of the day and night. The next week, she started dating one of the captains of the lacrosse team. Phil Abruzzo. Phil and I had known each other since we were toddlers, and had always hated each other. Amy had been well aware of this, and I’m sure it factored heavily into her decision to date him.
          I spent my time in school trying to avoid her, trying to act like I was having the best time of my life even though I was in emotional agony. I never walked to class alone. I always made sure there was a girl with me. I even managed to befriend one of Amy’s friends, and I took her off-campus for lunch and coffee breaks every chance I could get. 
          As far as I knew my efforts were having no effect, until one day about two weeks into her relationship with Phil, she cornered me at my locker. I felt a rush of adrenaline and hurt and love and lust all at once, but I did my best to seem only mildly annoyed. “Excuse me,” I muttered, ““I gotta get to class.”
          But before I could step away, she took me by the forearm. “Jealous?” she asked me.
          “Of who?”
          “Phil?”
          “Jealous? You think I’m jealous because you’re dating Phil?” I tried to ask with a tone that sounded like disbelief and amusement. Of course, she’d had me dead to rights. “Pity’s more like it. I feel bad for you. I feel bad for you both.” 
          She smacked me across the face. 
          It felt wonderful. It was hardly a caress, but it was her skin against mine, and I loved it. I smiled. 
          She took a step closer to me and narrowed her eyes. “Skip fifth period,” she told me. “Meet me at the west doors.”
          All my efforts to appear aloof vanished in that instant. I nodded and promised her I would. Forty minutes later, we were walking to her house, which was only five minutes away. Not a word passed between us.

Her mother was a nurse and was working a shift at the hospital. Her father was dead, so he certainly wasn’t around to bother us. The house was ours. We went up to her room, and she shoved me down on her bed, and we kissed each other—desperate, starving, greedy. She slipped her hand between our bodies, put it up my shirt and scratched my chest, my stomach, and then began tugging at the fly of my khaki trousers. We rolled over, and I slipped from her grip then pulled her underwear off, from beneath her plaid skirt. I unbuttoned and unzipped my pants, and without a word or any hesitation, we were fucking—hate, hurt, love, lust, fear, regret, but also trust—she was the only one who knew me like this, and I was the only one who knew her like this. We let ourselves go completely, and she dug her nails into my back beneath my t-shirt. 
          When it was over, I collapsed next to her on her bed. I had known this room so well, but now it was forbidden to me except for this one brief reprieve. She kissed me and I kissed her, and we inhaled and exhaled into each other’s necks as we caught our breath. She told me she was hungry for a blueberry bagel. 
          I chuckled. “I love how hungry you get after sex,” I said. Then I glanced at her digital clock-radio and saw that we needed to be getting back to school. “No time for brunch. We gotta jet,” I told.
          I stood up, and she watched me zip and button my khakis. She covered her mouth in surprise. “We got my blood all over your pants,” Amy told me, sounding worried. She’d been on her period, which had never stopped us before and didn’t stop us then.
          I shrugged.
          “Just don’t tuck your shirt in,” she warned me as she put a fresh pad into her underwear and pulled them up and adjusted the waist of her short, plaid skirt. “OK,” she sighed, “let’s go.”
          When I got back, I saw Phil in the hallway. “Hey,” I called to him, as friendly as I could muster.
          “The fuck you want?” he asked me.
          I motioned for him to come closer. And he did. Maybe he was expecting me to throw a punch. Instead, I whispered, “Check this out,” and I pointed down to the crotch of my khakis, where there were streaks of Amy’s blood.
          “Fuck’s that?” he asked. He had no idea, but he knew it was meant to offend him, and his expression suggested that had been accomplished.
          “Amy’s on her period,” I said, as I set a hand on his shoulder, as if I were imparting sage advice. “And now her period’s on me.” I gave his shoulder a quick friendly pat, then I walked away, thinking he’d probably punch me in the back of the head. But to my surprise, I got away unscathed.
          They broke up later that day. I thought Amy and I would get back together, but it had only driven us further apart. She called me that night. “Why the fuck did you say that to Phil?” I could tell she was crying.                 “That was supposed to be our secret!”
          “It was?” I asked dumbly. But I realized what she meant. It was impulsive and maybe even animalistic, but it was intimate and special. I had felt that even as it was happening, and then again in the afterglow. But instead of simply savouring it, I’d weaponized it. “Sorry,” I said. Though I don’t think I was. After all, it caused her and Phil to split.
          She hung up on me.
          We never spoke after that. We graduated high school, went off to different colleges and careers, each step, each year, taking us further and further away from each other, from the love, from the pain, until finally we were little more than a collection of memories, like creased and crinkled photographs, birthday cards and mixtapes that fill a dented cardboard box buried somewhere in the back of a closet.

But no. Here she is.
          “Amy,” I say again and maybe now because the dilaudid has hit, and I feel as if I’m floating on a softly undulating sea, I find myself wanting to cry. “Amy,” I repeat.
          “Feeling better?”
          “How’s it possible?”
          “It’s a miracle drug. I don’t recommend standing up, though,” she says with a smile. “You’ll probably throw up.”
          “But how’s this possible,” I ask her, gesturing between the two of us.
          “It’s okay,” she tells me. “We’ve got a lot of options to keep the pain down. You just hit that button if you need anything.”
          Does she not recognize me, I wonder? Is it my gray hair? It’s dark in the room. That’s why. It must be.               But shouldn’t she recognize my name? It’s right there on the information placard mounted near my bed, it’s printed on my plastic bracelet. It’s clearly in her files, in the computer system. Is it some sort of professional code of conduct thing?
          “Amy,” I say.
          But she’s standing up now, and her back is turned to me. Her body looks much the same it did when we were seniors in high school. She turns back to me for a moment and says, “I’ll check in on you in a bit. Try to get some rest, though.”

The morning light is flooding in through a window opposite me that I hadn’t noticed the night before. I hold up a hand to block the sun from blinding me. I am drenched in sweat but I’m freezing cold. My gown is sticking to my skin, and I can feel the pillowcase sticking to the back of my sweaty neck. As my eyes adjust from the harsh transition from sleep to blinding light, I can start to make out my surroundings, and I notice that Doctor Stanato is standing before me, wearing a big, friendly smile, as if he’s running for office and I’m a potential voter.
          “How we feeling? Good night’s sleep?” he asks me.
          “You won’t—” I start to say, intending to say you won’t believe it. I’m eager to tell him about Amy, but just as quickly as I start speaking, it feels as if someone has plunged a dull and rusty dagger into my abdomen. The doctor snaps at a nurse who I’ve just noticed is sitting at a computer in the corner. It isn’t Amy. 
          She rushes over with a portable scanner, zaps my plastic bracelet, punches in a code, and then retrieves medicine. She hands me a small plastic cup with three pills in it, and then she hands me a gray plastic mug of water in which a flexible, accordion-style straw is threaded through a blue, plastic lid. 
          I tilt the pills into my mouth, and then suck up enough water to swallow them down.
          The doctor smiles and nods. “It’s a muscle relaxer, and some oxycodone,” he says. “It’ll take 20 minutes or so to really kick in, but once it does, you’ll feel much better.”
          “Thank you,” I say through gritted teeth.
          “I not only wanted to see how you’re feeling, but I thought it might be a good idea to go over the surgery. As you know, we’d been expecting to remove about five or six centimeters—” he starts to tell me.
          “I remember. From last night.”
          “Last night?”
          “When you came in.”
          He chuckles. “You must have had a pretty vivid dream. I did check in on you last night, but we certainly didn’t review any of the details. You were out cold.”
          “You took out a lot more. A foot. Then a half a foot.”
          I can tell from his expression that he’s shocked. “Did you perhaps have a conversation with a nurse?” he asks me.
          I shake my head.
          But he’s made his mind up. “That must have been it. Understandable if you don’t specifically remember it. Midazolam can do that. Pretty much induces amnesia, so even if you do end up feeling anything, you can’t remember it once it’s over.”
          “Transfusion.”
          “Remarkable,” he says in frustration. “I need to have a discussion with the nursing staff. Standard process is that initial review is done via the surgical team, not the nurses.”
          “But you told me,” I mutter.
          “Sandra, who was the nurse on duty last night?”
          “Ummm,” the nurse says as she taps on some keys at the computer. “Amy.”
          “Amy who? Which Amy?”
          “Amy Parker,” the nurse answers.
          But that’s not her last name. At least it wasn’t when I knew her. It was Sullivan. Amy Sullivan. And now I am trying to figure out if it wasn’t really my Amy, or—if it was—if she’s married now.
          “I didn’t talk to the nurse. You told me. I don’t even remember a nurse,” I tell him. “I slept through the entire night,” I lie. I’m desperate to protect Amy, to make sure she doesn’t get into trouble or get reassigned to a different room or floor for whenever her next shift is. “I promise, you told me.”
          But he either pretends to not hear me, or he actually can’t understand me, which may very well be the case, because my tongue feels thick, and my breathing is slow and shallow, and I am having a hard time enunciating my words. “How are you feeling now?” the doctor asks. “Besides the pain, I mean.”
          “There’s nothing besides the pain. It’s all there is. Pain. Just pain.”
          He nods, completely unsurprised or even concerned. To me, my pain is special. To him, it’s as unique as a tile in the gray hospital floor.    
          “So much pain,” I whisper.
          “Well,” the surgeon says amicably, “those meds should be kicking in before too long. Meantime, if you need anything, just buzz the nurse and I’m sure she’ll be happy to help,” he tells me, but his words are becoming spaced further and further apart and now I’m once again falling back into that tomb-like sleep.

“Tommy. Tommy.”
          I awaken to my name being whispered directly into my ear. The room is dark, but I can feel her breath, and I can smell her. She smells just as she did in high school. I’m filled with relief.
          “Amy.”
          “I need to take your vitals.”
          “Okay,” I tell her. 
          She slips a cuff onto my arm, and a plastic alligator-type clip on to the tip of my finger. Then she presses some buttons on a machine, and the cuff inflates, tightening around my arm. 
          “Amy Sullivan?”
          “Parker,” she says.
          “How are you here?”
          “I work here,” she says with the slightest giggle. “I’ve worked here for almost ten years.”
          “But how did you end up here?”
          “Eighty-eight percent. I’m going to need you to try to take deeper breaths. Otherwise, we’re going to have put you on oxygen.”
          I try to take a deep breath, but as my lungs inflate, it feels as if I’m being jabbed with bayonets from all angles. “Can’t…can’t,” I sputter.
          Amy reaches behind me and a few moments later, she has clear plastic tubing in her hands, and she’s putting it over my ears, under my chin, and into my nostrils. “I want you to keep trying to breathe,” she tells me. “We don’t want you getting post-surgery pneumonia.”
          I nod compliantly.
          “Now. What else can I do for you? Ready for some more Dilaudid?”
          I nod. And then I ask her, “Are you married?”
          “Technically,” she sighs. “Separated. En route to a divorce. You?”
          “Divorced.”
          “Kids?”
          “One,” I say, and I want to tell her that I share custody with my ex, and that we actually have a fairly amicable relationship as exes go, but with the dilaudid taking effect, the thought of trying to say anything more than a couple of words sounds as likely as running a marathon.
          “I’ve always wanted kids, but my husband was dead-set against it,” she says a little sadly.
          I want to tell her that I’d like to have another. But all I can do is smile.
          “You can feel that dilaudid now, can’t you?” she asks me.
          I nod. But I don’t want to talk about the dilaudid. I want to talk about her, about us. I want to ask her if she’d like to try again with me. Maybe we could have worked if only we’d just been a little older, been a little more mature. I want to ask her if she’s ever wondered the same. But she seems so unfazed to see me, it makes me wonder if she feels anything at all. It hardly seems as if she remembers me. In fact, I’m still not entirely sure this is the same Amy from my youth. How could it be? It’s almost as if she hasn’t aged. She looks exactly the way she did when we knew each other. But that was nearly three decades ago.
          “Oh,” she says, and I see her looking down toward my lap.
          I feel a wet, warmth spreading around my groin. I look down at my gown and see a scarlet spot about the size of a quarter, but it’s rapidly growing to a silver-dollar size, and beyond.
          “Bleeding,” I say in an alarmed whisper.
          “Yeah,” she says, her voice no longer sad, but alert and sharp. She grabs some sterile gauze pads and rushes to me. “Lift up your bottom for me,” she tells me. I’m struck at how she’s talking to me. Like a child. Not like we were each other’s first loves, first lovers. My bottom? 
          “Tommy, wake up,” she’s telling me. “Come on, lift your hips for me. I know it hurts, but lift your hips.”
          I’d apparently fallen asleep, and I look back down at my gown and the blood has spread to about the size of a dinner plate. I put my elbows and forearms beneath me, brace myself and try to lift my hips. The pain tears through my core, and I feel the flow of more blood.
          Amy seizes my gown and pulls it up, revealing my blood-soaked, naked lap. Above my penis, below my belt line, where I once had pubic hair but that they’d evidently shaved, there is an incision about six inches wide. It’s pumping blood. I can feel myself going faint. Amy presses gauze to it, and my vision goes white with blinding pain. With a free hand, she fishes a mobile phone from her scrubs and dials a number.
          “Room 917. Code H.” She pauses. “Yes. Hurry.” She ends the call and slips the phone back into her scrubs.
          “It looks bad. But it’s not that much blood,” she tells me. “Don’t worry. And try to stay awake for me.”
          “Wouldn’t be first time got blood on me,” I slur, and I try to wink. I have no idea if I’ve spoken clearly or loud enough for her to hear me. She appears to not register the remark. Instead, she’s applying pressure to the incision, replacing blood-saturated wads of gauze with snow-white, sterile squares of the stuff. “I said,” I try again, speaking much more slowly now, “wouldn’t be the first time I got blood on me.”
          She looks up from my wound with a look that suggests she doesn’t understand.
          “Last time, wasn’t my blood,” I say with a smile. I’m getting so tired.
          “Shhh,” she tells me. “Don’t use up any energy. A doctor is on his way. We’ll get the bleeding stopped, and if you need any more blood, we can always do that.”
          The transfusion. I’d completely forgotten about that. “Guess this not my blood, either,” I say with barely any breath behind it.
          A doctor enters the room and immediately asks Amy how it’s going.
          “It’s slowing down,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s the glue, or the sutures, or something else—”
          “I’ll take a look,” he says. Amy stands up, and the doctor takes her seat. “What’s your name?” he asks me in a loud voice. I can tell he’s only trying to keep me awake.
          “Tommy,” I mumble.
          “Thomas?”
          “Tommy,” Amy says.
          The doctor is surprised by her interjection.
          “Not Thomas,” she tells him. And before I fall into a sleep filled with memories of our old hometown, of that forbidden bedroom, of her blood that I wore so proudly upon my clothing, I hear her say my name one more time. “That’s what he goes by. Tommy. He always has.”

David Obuchowski is a prolific and awards-winning/nominated writer of fiction as well as longform nonfiction, some of which has been adapted for film and television. His short fiction has appeared in Arcturus Magazine (Chicago Review of Books), Baltimore Review, West Trade Review, Fairlight Shorts, Toronto Journal, and many others. He is co-author of  the children’s book, How Birds Sleep (Astra), which collected a number of prestigious honors. Find out more: www.DavidObuchowski.com