The gift of blood

The country with the world’s longest Christmas season is finally showing all the signs of the year-end rush to celebrate. Traffic, extended mall hours, frantic gift-giving, selective party-going and other stresses sometimes make Filipinos forget the reason we’re celebrating in the first place. How many of us have lived lives wherein we knew what the eventual outcome would be, the how and why everything would end? And if we did, would we have the courage to go through with it, anyway? This is what we are really celebrating, that a god-man named Jesus chose the path wherein he would inevitably, inescapably spill His blood for mankind?

Blood is life, and symbolically or even actually spilling blood for any cause instantly gives it meaning. Athletes spill “blood, sweat and tears”, which is why, particularly for Filipinos, the more primal sports like boxing and mixed martial arts have a very strong appeal. We see people we admire literally risk getting wounded for their advancement and our entertainment. Our other favorite sports require equally simply – almost primitive – tools: a ball and a hoop, a long stick and some small stones, or a rolling stone and wooden pins. We like to see our heroes get bloodied, because it reminds us that we are not alone in our struggles, that even when bloodied, we can rise to the challenge. When did the “never say die” spirit of Ginebra catalyze? When Robert Jaworski spilled blood through a cut in his face in a 1985 game against NCC, got stitched up, and returned to lead a charge to victory. When did Manny Pacquiao rise to fame? When Erik Morales beat him in their first fight, and he returned unbowed to beat Morales twice.

In the Olympics, trying to add to your blood’s strength is prohibited, blood doping is the practice of artificially enhancing your blood’s capacity to bring oxygen to your muscles, thus temporarily improving your performance. Athletes who attempt to do this usually increase the capability of their hemoglobin, or inject themselves with synthetic hormones that can perform the same function. Most often, they inject themselves with their own blood, which had been extracted days or weeks previous to their competition, or use the blood of someone with a similar blood type. In sports where hundredths of a second can mean the difference between eternal fame or anonymity, they think it’s worth it. In the 2000 Summer Olympics, blood testing to detect the artificial hormone EPO was instituted, forever changing the way drug testing was perceived worldwide. In 2004, another test to detect synthetic oxygen carriers was likewise implemented.

The subject of not just improving performance but prolonging life came up for this writer with the passing of Rebecca Javelona Sison on Friday. Tita Ebet is the mother of my dear friend and Hardball co-host Boyet Sison, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with for nine years, no small feat. She was a kind, gentle woman of 80 who raised children with vastly different, strong personalities, but who all grew up with a love for the richness of life that is hard to match. She will be dearly missed, as she inspired many of us as parents. That and an urgent message from a long-time acquaintance stirred up a lot of memories, and the realization that I have been a blood donor for 25 years. Perhaps it was a way of doing what I could never achieve as an athlete, living forever in people’s memory. That is one reason why athletes reach for records: to be remembered for their daring and unique abilities. Perhaps another way is by sharing the gift of blood, the gift of life.

It all began in 1990 when, as a young television producer and anchorman, I was asked if I would like to donate blood for a friend’s family member. Despite my apprehensions (after all who likes to have long needles stuck into them), I tried it, then read up on how blood donations save lives, and the health benefits of donating your blood. I discovered that I had O-, Rh- blood, quite rare, but a universal donor for negative blood types. That type of blood is most commonly found in Caucasians, and is particularly hard to find in countries like the Philippines.

Soon after, I received an urgent phone call in the office, right before a PBA broadcast that same year. A Spanish-Filipino teenager had been diagnosed with dengue and could be bleeding internally. It turns out he was a PBA fan, and watched my broadcasts. When I met him, he bragged to his friends that I was now his blood brother. He went on to become a successful dentist in Spain, my blood brother. Since then, I have had the honor of donating blood twice or thrice a year for a quarter of a century, to friends, classmates, acquaintances, total strangers, even to my own high school teacher and father figure, Onofre Pagsanghan just a couple of years ago. It is a strange feeling, as if you are dying a little to help extend life. But over the years, it has become more exciting for me. I can now proudly say I have more than 50 blood brothers and sisters walking around, aside from my own children who carry my blood, if not my blood type. Maybe a part of me will live forever.

To be fair, giving blood is not for the squeamish. If the intern handling you is not proficient, you may have to endure multiple attempts to insert the needles into your arm. There will be some pain involved, though the procedure generally doesn’t last more than 20 minutes or so. They’ll extract about 450 ml from your arm, and tell you to rest for a couple of hours and not operate heavy machinery yet. Some of the blood you gave will be tested during processing. In many cases, a patient is asked to provide four blood donors of any type to simply replenish what will be used for his or her surgery. At times, the patient’s specific blood type is needed, so a frenetic search begins.

Some sports trainers use muscle memory techniques for athletes who have been injured, as a way of helping them heal faster. They make the athletes go through physical therapy, aided by videos of themselves in action at their peak, so that their bodies will “remember” how they have to be to reach that level again. On an even more intimate level, some scientists believe that our blood cells not only carry our genetic information, but even our sensory memories, a sort of memory card of our life experiences. Some theories on cloning claim that a clone could have duplicate memories of its original. If that were true, clones could conceivably replace independent, strong-willed us and extend our existence for decades. But no matter what, we owe our lives to blood, the blood we’ve been given. Let’s use that gift of life to make people’s lives around us better.