Why is it called "hemophilia"? That doesn't make any sense. If anything you'd think that what they call "hemophilia" would in fact induce hemophobia. I mean, it's not like you hear a lot of these exchanges:
"Dude! You're bleeding everywhere!!"
"Yeah, I know. I love it!"
By and large, your so-called hemophiliacs don't love blood. But I love blood. Blood has so many uses - from the physiological to the purely decorative!
I've always thought blood was great. It's this whole fluid that we run on. It just keeps on absorbing bad stuff and dropping it off where it can be excreted, and then absorbing good stuff and dropping it off where it can be used. This is known as the Bessemer Process. The whole thing runs on a complex system of chemical checks and balances, partly to do with osmosis, but mostly it goes beyond that. I think it's pretty marvelous, and I should know.
But let's get beyond such purely scientific, purely utilitarian concerns. Blood is just great from an aesthetic standpoint. Blood is sensuous. The thrum of your veins when your blood is up - thrilling! The color of blood - so beautiful, and so alarming at the same time. And when somebody punches you in the side of the face, and your inside cheek gets cut on your clenched teeth, that taste - salty, metallic, above all red - the taste of blood is just the perfect accompaniment to go with the jarring shock of a fist's impact, or for that matter, with the stabbing pain and dull, heavy throb of your poor tongue after you've accidentally bitten it.
Blood is also great as a metaphor. For a lot of things! You can just imagine.
Anyway, when you consider all of the different aspects, it all comes back to the same thing: I love blood. And yet, if I said I was a hemophiliac, everyone would be getting the wrong idea. Perhaps I should just go with "hemophile", but I bet you look that one up and it turns out to be some kind of fetish already.
I find the whole thing disturbing, frankly. Another symptom of the sick way our society pathologizes just about absolutely everything.
3 comments:
I always thought it was like saying your body/the disease loved the blood. Loves the blood, doesn't love the clotting.
Which makes sense, since clotted blood is totally different. It can be all scabby, and it doesn't have that lustrous blood color and viscosity.
But if it loved the blood...it would want to keep the blood! Not let it all go running away!
It doesn't have control of where the blood flows, just that it flows. And most hemophiliacs have problems with bruising more than actual blood loss outside the body. And of course there's the danger of various types of internal bleeding.
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