Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [43]
A healthy erythrocyte will continue its nonstop travel, cycle after cycle after cycle, for about 120 days until, too exhausted and battered to go on, it drops off the circuit. Scavenger cells in the spleen gobble it up and strip it of iron and other components, which are then sent for recycling to the body’s blood incubator: the bone marrow. Here, in these hot, spongy, fat- and vascular-rich tunnels, reside the ancestral cells from which erythrocytes, as well as all other cells of the body, are derived: the stem cells. Those that are specially programmed to become red cells divide and multiply; three million form per second. But these proto-red-cells, technically called erythroblasts, are not yet ready to enter the bloodstream. They must first mature and acquire ample hemoglobin. When they are finally ready to squeeze through tiny blood vessels and enter into circulation, a defining event occurs: They lose their nuclei, the cellular “brains” in which DNA is encased. Structurally, this sets erythrocytes apart from most other cells. Without a nucleus, there’s more room for hemoglobin and, therefore, for more oxygen. But its absence also guarantees each individual red cell’s demise, for without a nucleus it cannot reproduce. What’s more, stripped of DNA, the body’s biological signature, it has no identity. In this regard the formation of an erythrocyte is the antithesis of a classic origin story.
In the comic-book definition, the origin encapsulates a character’s pivotal moment of transformation, telling in orderly panels and with pithy phrasing how he or she came to be. Ordinary human beings have such tales, too. But we don’t call them origin stories, we call them ordeals—those life-changing episodes that, assembled in hindsight, tell us who we are. Coming out in my early twenties was mine. For my sister Shannon, leaving both the church and her training with the Carmelite nuns back in 1984 was but a prelude to hers. The events that would truly transform her life began unfolding a few years later.
She was twenty-nine, living by herself in Seattle, and working as a department-store shoe salesperson. I’d moved to San Francisco three years earlier and was living in the Castro district. In many ways Shannon and I were on similar paths—both lapsed Catholics, both dodging our disapproving parents at every turn, both trying to figure out who we were at the core—but going in different directions and at very different speeds. I had chased down a life I’d desired for years, whereas she, partly out of loyalty to me, had relinquished hers. While I’d found my community, Shannon was now without one. The farther she’d gotten from Catholicism, the greater her disenchantment with its dogma. On the one hand, distance had made things clearer—she’d lost her religion but not her faith—and yet, stripped of her long-held identity and without a new passion, she struck me as being a little aimless.
During our regular phone calls, I always dominated the conversation with stories of my friends and my jobs—first at a small theater company, then at the modern art museum—and of my first serious relationship. That dynamic changed with a phone call in the spring of 1988. “I’m pregnant,” Shannon told me.
I hugged the refrigerator. What came to my lips was not Congratulations! or How wonderful! but: “Are you sure?”
She was not only sure, she was more than six months along.
It hit me that I knew next to nothing about my sister’s social life—aside from the girlfriend with whom she went to movies and out dancing—let alone her love life. “So, who is he?