Hemorrhage

Have you ever had one of those nosebleeds? Not the kind where you happen to catch some red with a routine blow, but a truly epic nosebleed? The ones when you finally give up blowing and instead fashion a nasal tamponade from toilet paper to act as a finger in the dike? The choking kind, the kind with after-shocks that quake for days?

Sadly, I am one of the afflicted. I can vouch that it is difficut to breathe with both nostrils stoppered. I keep Kleenex in the car, in my purse, in the office. I have been awakened in the middle of the night to the taste of blood, which I know all too well. I can also attest to the unpleasant sensation experienced by the nefarious meeting of styptic hemostatic pencil and mucous membranes.

Somehow it seems funnier when I relate it to a comedy sketch from the show The Kids in The Hall, circa 1989. In one episode, kids visit a freak show featuring a Chicken Lady (which you may, but hopefully, don't remember) and one off-attraction: the Man Whose Nose Bleeds at Will. The sketch was funny at the time (I was 17). Even less appropriate (but far more comical) is Randy, a character whose nose bleeds like a faucet in one infamous episode of How I Met Your Mother. (Warning YouTubers: content is questionable at best.)

I'm thankful that I've never been subjected to a terribly public nosebleed, nor a nosebleed (like Randy) on a first date, nor have I been put on display at the circus. Not yet.

My daily nosebleeds are not typically strenuous-- I can usually get them to stop within 5-10 minutes. But every couple weeks, I get a real doozy: the kind where I could waste a roll of TP, but instead have learned it is best to simply lean over the sink for 10-20 minutes, all the time praying my kids don't pop in and see all that red and think that I am bleeding to death. When you think about it, there is a strange beauty about blood. Although it is a taboo subject and often associated with trauma and death, it is truly essential to life. Anemic, we wilt. Excess, and we clot. One tiny chemical mistake in the complexity of the clotting cascade can cause exanguination.

Although I am inconvenienced by the occasional 'epic nosebleed', more than anything I hate to see all that life-blood wasted. Down the drain, literally. I don't know why I feel a loss-- it is not like I poured my sweat and tears into manufacturing that blood. Maybe the minor bloodletting is somehow to blame for my constant chills, my oft-lightheadedness, my slow running pace, or poor endurance on a hike? Maybe someone else could make better use of that blood vs. my plumbing? (Folks with frequent nosebleeds are not the best candidates for donating blood, I'm told.)

Now don't freak out: I had my blood count and platelets checked. I do not have some horrible disease like idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura or leukemia. I just live in a rather dry climate and have nasal veins in close surface proximity, primed for launch. I should admittedly see the ENT doc and submit to coagulation to burn those veins beyond all recognition. Or maybe I should move to Seattle.

But for now, I will continue to disinfect my sinks and hands daily. It does make me ponder. (I freely recognize it is a leap to wax philosophical amidst a blog on nosebleeds, but that is the jump I am going to make, so grab my prose like an outstretched hand and climb alongside...)

How many gifts have we been given, intended to sustain and even enrich our lives, which go unwanted, unrecognized, or unused? Are we teeming with potential that lies untapped or even wasted? How many opportunities have we let slip through our fingers and down the drain?

What talents and passions are yet to be discovered, or even denied for fear of the taboo, unspeakable, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, intimidating, or difficult? What have you discounted as 'out of the realm of possibility'?

Whatever it is, when it pours out of us, I pray that it pours life into others.