Donating A Life

My hairdresser tells me she’s had a blood test for the first time in her life. She says she shook with nerves, unsure what to expect, but it didn’t hurt. I congratulate her on having got this far without needing a blood test. She was surprised by how much was taken for the vials and she doesn’t think she’ll ever pluck up the courage to donate blood.

I remember my son point blank refusing to let the phlebotomist near his arm to test for Lyme disease, after getting a tick bite when he was seven. That tick had feasted on his head for three weeks, before I realised that’s what it was. I thought it was some kind of peculiar fast-growing wart. Then one day it just disappeared and I discovered the engorged tick wriggling on the carpet alongside his bed.

We gave up on the Lyme’s blood test after three attempts, which resulted in wailing so loud that the poor nurse looked like he was considering a career change. Fortunately, despite the tick’s long residence, Milo didn’t get sick.

Now, he’s fearless about needles, and is a blood donor1. He’s also joined the stem cell register2, which means if he’s a match for someone needing a bone marrow transplant, he will be contacted. (UK links in the notes.)

I haven’t donated blood since the mobile collection unit stopped visiting my area twenty years ago, but luckily, it’s now returning twice a year, so I’m booked in for October. If I leave it any longer, I’ll be mothballed, due to age. All my family are blood donors now, having realised how many people going through chemotherapy rely on transfusions and top-ups during their treatment.

My son-in-law has had acute leukemia and would have died without the generosity of blood donors. And now, thanks to a bone marrow transplant, he has a whole new immune system and lease of life. After all the waves he and his family have ridden during this past year since that ominous diagnosis, it was utter joy this week to see him swimming in the sea with his two children.

I spotted this sign on the door of the treatment room when my dad was in a care home for rehab following hip replacement surgeries in 2012. I’m not sure he saw the funny side.

I missed out on restaurant critic and broadcaster Grace Dent’s memoir, Hungry, when it was first published in 2020, but after several Wendy’s World readers recommended it, I gobbled it up. What a tour de force. We’re both from the north of England (Grace is from Carlisle, I’m from Barnsley), and she’s a decade or so younger, but there was so much I identified with. Her working class origins. Her chaotic comprehensive schooling. Her family’s reliance on more-ish convenience foods (as you’d expect, she writes brilliantly about food and battling her own appetites). Her ambition to move to London to write for magazines. Her awkwardness fitting in with posher, more moneyed colleagues.

She can capture a world and its attitudes in a couple of sentences. On her teenage years, she writes:

“We had boyfriends who smoked bongs and listened to AC/DC who were scaffolders and picked us up from school in their Ford Capri to drive us home.

“The word grooming was just something posh girls did with their ponies.”

Grace realises that she never wants to be “a mam”, after witnessing the sacrifices her own mother made.

“Being a woman, a wife, a mammy was less about wearing lipstick and nice frocks and more about looking like, as Mam said, ‘the wreck of the Hesperus’, in a cardigan over loose pyjama bottoms. It seemed like a lot of being knackered and fighting with a bin bag and asking for jobs to be done again until you finally did it yourself.”

Grace’s own marriage falters when, absorbed by her career, she realises that every household needs a “mam”, even if there aren’t any children.

“A home needs someone elbows deep in it, every day, constantly.”

Ironically, as her parents age, there comes the inevitable shift when she is increasingly having to parent them: manage appointments, move back north to navigate her father’s encroaching dementia, all while juggling her demanding media career. Her writing on this phase of life is deeply moving, though her sense of humour pervades it all.

Such an absorbing read.

From a funny piece I enjoyed on Substack this week:

“My daughter can look me dead in the eye and tell me the exact moment she lost faith in me. And I sit there and take it because…fair. I really should have made sure that goldfish was completely flushed.”

It’s from In defence of the good enough moms, on parenting a child who pushes all your buttons, by Linda Unternahrer.

Please comment, if anything here resonates. I love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks so much for the engagement with last week’s post, July Talk. You’ll be glad to know I steered well-clear of the TV for the 3rd/4th play-offs, hence England bringing home the exciting bronze.

Until next time!