DARK BLOOD

My mother died at age 89 of a blood cancer.  It was a kind that interfered with clotting and it takes five years of gradually increasing fatigue until death.  The treatment of last resort is transfusions of platelets but one can only accept transfusions a limited number of times.  In the end her intestine developed a small hemorrhage that killed her without much pain.

We learned the hard way.  My mother interpreted the sensation as constipation, a familial concern, and took a dose of Milk of Magnesia.  The result was a flood of digested blood, black, that luckily happened in the bathroom. (Very black feces are a sign of cancer.)  Towards the end in the hospital she managed to swindle and pressure the nurse into giving her Milk of Magnesia again and this time it was a black flood of the bed and the adjacent floor.  The woman who came to clean it up was an older Black woman.  She didn't complain but my mother raged indignantly that no human being should have to do that kind of work.

Married to a taxidermist and hunter, I saw the insides of a lot of animals, but was impressed that there wasn't usually much blood.  Most organs and cavities of mammal bodies are lined with silvery membranes that keep muscles grouped.  The exception was the first time I went hunting with Bob and he shot a deer in the high fall snow of the Rockies, gutting it quickly and washing his hands in the crimsoned snowfall.

Vertebrates, meaning creatures with backbones, all have blood.  The fuel of their cells is hemoglobin which is iron-based and capable of carrying oxygen.  "The cell membrane is composed of proteins and lipids, and this structure provides properties essential for physiological cell function such as deformability and stability while traversing the circulatory system and specifically the capillary network.  In humans, mature red blood cells are flexible and oval biconcave disks. They lack a cell nucleus and most organelles, in order to accommodate maximum space for hemoglobin; they can be viewed as sacks of hemoglobin, with a plasma membrane as the sack."  (Wikipedia)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell

Unlike all the other cells who stay put, red blood cells move through the body at the rate of one circulation a minute.  "The only known vertebrates without red blood cells are the crocodile icefish (family Channichthyidae); they live in very oxygen-rich cold water and transport oxygen freely dissolved in their blood."  Not only are they cold-blooded, they are also "bloodless" while alive.

Oxygenated vs. depleted

Because of a brilliant high school science teacher, I've watched the exhausted dark blood be infused with oxygen that turned it back to scarlet.  We can see cold extremities and chilled lips turn blue.  In seminary I had a Black Baptist counselor who was fascinated that my face changed color with changes in emotion because my blood circulation changed.  My face didn't go blue, but it did flush and blush.  This is how it is often an indicator of emotion to observers.  From the inside one feels the pulse, the shift, the dizziness.

Metaphors based on blood are everywhere, even in the legal governmental system for indigenous people developed in their dark past, where it stands for provenance, which is genetic relationships.  In the 19th century, when indigenous people were culturally and vividly different enough to be labeled a "race" and get that mixed up with "species", the cavalry tried to cope by listing everyone in each "tribe" which they understood to have distinct edges and be something like nationality.  Today when we have evidence that even Neanderthals could and did interbreed with early modern people, the artificial categories are breaking down. "Species" is defined arbitrarily as creatures who are fertile together. This idea was destroyed nine months after Columbus landed in America but no one admitted it. 

What was called "races" was simply adaptation to place, but the issue is so emotional that "blood" has become a war cry and access to money as well as things like education.  Because the humanity of the indigenous was proven by world wars in which they served, spilling blood alongside everyone else, knowing the four protein types of blood cells -- necessary to know for transfusions -- made "blood" even more vital.  It was noted on dogtags. It became confused with DNA, which is a different cell system that is present in the nucleus and a few of the "inclusions" like mitochondria.  Red blood cells off-load their DNA nuclear instructions to other cells once they have become mature.  This is because they are meant to squeeze through tiny capillaries and can deform themselves to do it but need to stay small.  

A result of diabetes when the sugar load of the blood is high is that getting red blood to the extremities is befuddled.  When I go to bed at night, my feet sting as though they have been frozen and are warming again, because when I sit too long to keyboard, my foot cells don't get blood all the way to the end.  My feet are always cold now, though I used to have hot feet.  Fingers on the keyboard stay warm because muscles moving help the heart push blood to the ends. If blood is blocked too long, as with a tourniquet, cells can die.  If I sit in a way that pinches arteries, my legs go to sleep.

Blood is movement, a rush, darkly plunging through the body, taking up and putting down the load of oxygen it gets from its body partner, the lungs that give it the oxygen.  Not a sensory organ, yet it sustains all relationships with the environment and supports the frame of reference that communicates both raging and gentle attachment between people.  The temperature of blood is controlled by the thalamus, which is kept informed by connection to the skin so it controls both shivering and sweating, indicators of emotion as well as environment.  The sweat rolls off visibly from guilty politicians. Their blood pressure is high.

Blood is passion, the color of love and gallantry, the indicator of wounds and sealer of loyalty oaths.  Crime vids are splashed with it, usually as vivid and bright as possible, but sometimes it can be depicted with chocolate syrup, dark, but bitter rather than sweet, old blood rather than pulsing new, as bright as poppies in the wind.