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December 3, 2007

I Am Not Anemic

I try to give blood regularly. Aside from what aide my excess plasma might provide to others, I enjoy the whole procedural aspect: the needles and the tourniquets and rubber tubes, the little pinprick they give your finger and the way the drops of blood they pull bloom and descend with long waverying trails in those vials of blue liquid.

Last summer, though, those drops fell wrong. I failed the anemia test and was turned away. I remember a wave of unexpected satisfaction spreading at the news: I'd wanted to be anemic since I was fifteen. I don't know why, precisely. Part of it was probably aesthetic, since in those moody days I wanted my skin to be as blanched and transluscent as possible (to the extent that I'd put on makeup before going to school). I'm pretty sure, though, that a degree of self destructiveness was implicit in the desire: I really wanted something to be wrong with me, and anemia seemed to have my name written all over it.

Enough traces of that cloudy inclination must have held fast in my psyche, because I took my diagnosis that morning and held it fast and proud. I valued this newfound fragility, and over the following months, I began to notice other tell-tale signs: occasional dizzyness, a lighter head. One day not too long ago, I was helping out on a short film and in the middle of a take my vision suddenly faded to white and I passed out (in the last second before the camera cut, you can see the boom microphone I was holding drop into frame as my body gave out). I made little attempts to take care of myself. I tried to eat more, at least most of the time.

And then the other morning I got a call from the Red Cross asking if I'd make another donation. I made the appointment and returned to the clinic for confirmation of my condition. My blood was strong this time; I passed the test; they plucked my veins and made their withdrawal, and I left feeling fitter, healthier and somewhat disappointed.

We were supposed to shoot a scene from St. Nick this past Saturday, but I decided to call it off. We may have a budget for this movie, but it's not so large that we can afford to rent a moving van to haul a dolly package an hour into the country for a single afternoon of shooting. Ah, logistics! So we'll fold that scene into the rest of the production, which is an ever-fluctuating entity whose ever growing reality is beginning to frighten me. It's a good kind of fright; I think I should be open about it. I know what I'm doing, even though not knowing what I'm doing is becoming such an integral part of my process, but it's still scary getting other people involved in something that resides so squarely within my head. And a lot of it isn't even that resolute: it's all still ethereal, wound up in this instinct that I've at long last begun to trust.

Posted by David Lowery at December 3, 2007 7:03 PM

Comments

Posted by: Adam Donaghey at December 3, 2007 11:55 PM