Love And Blood Bind Us Together In The Wake Of The Orlando Mass Shooting

One summer five years ago, I was lying on a surgeon’s table, my family gathered around watching me bleed, knowing there was nothing they could do.

I bled and I bled and I bled, and the 14 medical personnel in the room couldn’t find the reason. The doctor who had introduced my new daughter to her father seven hours earlier now told my husband to tell me goodbye. I was losing so much blood, and there was absolutely no one who could stop it. I could feel my end at hand.

I coded twice. A male nurse yelled, “Fuck! Run faster!” as we ran down the hall. It felt like a really cheesy medical drama come to life, and I was the reluctant star.

I wouldn’t be writing this today if it weren’t for the object on its way to my room, the object containing the stuff that would save me. I believe in a loving God, and that day the savior he sent me was brought to the hospital in a beat-up Coleman cooler. There was blood in that cooler, blood from a stranger I may not have even given a second glance at a restaurant, blood from a stranger I may well have cut off in traffic. I wonder what that stranger was doing as I lay dying. Was he fighting with a spouse? Was she diapering her child, unaware that her selflessness months before was saving another woman’s life?

I read an article this morning in which one of the survivors of the Orlando evil said, “There was just so much blood. It was everywhere.” I sat through church thinking about that scene and trying so hard not to. I’m a creative, passionate imaginer and so I was transported into that chaotic scene: people screaming, blood everywhere. Lights turned on. Club smoke clearing. Blood looking darker than it should under the fluorescence of lights not meant to be used during club operating hours. Panic. A horror movie come to life.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

I think of the man lying there next to his best friend, feeling the lifeblood draining out of his body as his friend tells him not to go. “Please don’t leave me. I love you so much. You’re everything. Please don’t go.” I imagine his boyfriend’s teardrops falling hot and clear on his face as everything starts to turn black. I imagine a wail from the man leaning over him, the final sob as he watches his Only One die, and then, a noise. The cavalry. Metal doors being smashed open and policemen and EMTs storming through, crying, “Who’s hurt? What do you need?”

“Here! We’re over here! Please! Help us! He’s dying!”

Then, the feeling of air underneath a body now white from the absence of blood being lifted up, up and up into the fluorescence and safety of a waiting ambulance.

That wounded man sees the same dark red in the ambulance, only this time the blood is contained and in bags along the side of the wall, not splattered about. The blood is waiting to help him, and it is a stranger’s.

That stranger may be a woman in her 60s living states away in the Bible belt, watching the television and begging God to let her son not have been in that club. That stranger may be a man in New York City who was just served his divorce papers. He is crying over his ruined life as the muted bluish-gray television broadcasts evil, sorrow, hurt, despair. He looks up to see the numbers of dead rising. He takes another drink and begins to cry harder.

I think of the web of humanity and love that connects us even in these darkest of times. I think of the random strangers who saved my life five years ago and of the moment I woke up from surgery screaming in a raspy voice over my breathing tube, “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

Monika Graff / Getty Images

My mind wanders back to the plight of that man in the ambulance, surely at the hospital by now. I think of the frustration on the face of the doctor as she learns that she does not have the extremely rare blood type that this dying man needs readily available. This man whose chubby toddler hand his mother kissed, this man who made a baking soda and vinegar volcano for the seventh-grade science fair. This man whose family is begging God to let him stay. I think of them all gathered underneath the fluorescent lights of the hospital waiting room, the fear on their faces giving way to despair as they realize their son, brother, and Love is lost.

I love to think, also, of the alternative. The alternative in which, though this bad thing has undoubtedly happened, there is enough blood for this man. His life force will come back, and he will appreciate life more than he could have ever thought possible. He will leave the hospital kissing the sky out of gratitude, and the sun will shine on his back as he continues his exhausting, rare, beautiful life.

Those wounds which an evil man ripped open and from which his blood spilled will be stitched up by the careful hand of a doctor, and a carefully placed needle will drip, drip, drip life back into his dying body.

And there, watching the whole while, his Love from the night club, the one who lay over him begging him not to die, will sit in his chair and cry. He will wonder whose blood now courses through the man’s body, and he will swear to himself to try to find out.

It’s love that binds us, not fear or hate or apathy.

We all bleed the same blood, and we cry the same tears, and we feel the same pain. We do. If you’re feeling helpless, choose to be that person another stranger thanks God for on a Saturday evening after his world has just fallen apart while you watch your Netflix and drink your soda. Do that one small act that changes the world, that act that gives fluorescence and blood a new meaning beyond carnage and death for the recipient.

Be the reason a man’s memory of fluorescence and blood makes him cry happy hospital tears.

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