Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [14]
While the letter was addressed to Steve, it wasn’t written to patients such as him, I noticed. It never mentioned, for instance, that the phlebotomist, by reusing needles, could have exposed HIV-positive patients to mutated strains of the virus. It is not just HIV that can be passed on, but an infected person’s entire drug-resistance history. Through reinfection, a patient already low on treatment options could be left with none. Steve put the letter aside and dug up his SmithKline Beecham records, finding he had used the lab eighteen different times.
The investigation of the phlebotomist became a sensational local news story. Reports focused chiefly on the possibility that uninfected patients had been exposed to HIV and hepatitis, which was neither inappropriate nor surprising. The accused had had contact with more than twelve thousand people over a period of many years, so the pool of potential victims was sizable. Even if they weren’t infected, there would be grounds for lawsuits for their emotional distress. But Steve helped me see a perspective never addressed in media accounts—that of a man whose blood could have been the source of infection for another, or even for many others, making him feel like an accessory to crimes he’d been powerless to stop.
“The idea of someone treating my blood so carelessly . . . ,” he said to me, pausing to steady his words. His eyes narrowed. “The possibility of my infecting someone else is horrifying.”
I’ve seen that look in Steve’s eyes one time since, late on a Saturday morning. A few moments earlier, I’d told him to sit down at our kitchen table. “Honey, I’ve gotta tell you something,” I’d said shakily. “It’s really important.”
A lifelong insomniac, I’d been struggling through an awful week of sleeplessness, as Steve knew. I’d rolled out of bed early that morning feeling exhausted yet again. I took a look at my face in the bathroom mirror. My red-rimmed eyes were so bloodshot, I imagined they’d sucked my veins dry, left me iron-poor, a bit anemic. So, I reasoned sleepily, I would be a patient of my own Dr. Feelgood: I would give myself an injection of Steve’s B12.
With the exception of sleeping pills, I’d never once considered taking any of his medications—and there were a couple of tempting ones, including Vicodin, which he used to treat his neuropathy pain. But this was different: a little instant vigor. It’s just a vitamin shot, I told myself as I reached for the vial in our kitchen cabinet.
The B12 injections were a new therapy for Steve. At his doctor’s suggestion, he had been using over-the-counter oral B12 supplements together with a B12 nasal gel, intended mainly as an antidote to drug-induced fatigue. He’d found the nasal gel messy, though, felt no less tired, and wondered, understandably, how much of the vitamin his body was even absorbing. His doctor’s solution: a prescription for full-strength B12, a single one-milliliter injection per week. We picked it up that same day along with a year’s supply of needles, a box of multiple pouches, the syringes within loose like Halloween candy. Steve’s doctor had taught me how to give him the shots, and I’d already done it several times, the last one just the day before. I was a natural, even a tad smug about it. I had no fear of needles, never have, a trait reinforced by the fact that Steve, unflappable in most things, was creeped out by them. He couldn’t even look when I gave him his shot.
In the semidarkness I grabbed one of the syringes, popped off the cap, and jabbed the needle through the glass vial’s gray rubber top. I felt weirdly proud of myself; I’d come up with a brilliant solution for being sleep-deprived. This is going to make me feel so much better! I pulled back the plunger and watched, ebullient, as the syringe filled with the bright red medicine, foaming at the top like a glass of Strawberry Crush. I tapped out the bubbles. Oops, I’d forgotten