Constellations

by Sinéad Gleeson

  The treatment for the clots that appeared in my leg and chest involved them being broken down with drugs and absorbed back into my body. Periods have masses of their own – congealed clots, the clumped lining, lumps the colour of liver in a butcher’s shop window – that are in the end expelled from the body. For a few months of my life, Congealment A (DVT) and Congealment B (menstruation) overlapped. The leg clot and pulmonary embolism ran untethered through my veins, a venous Bonnie and Clyde. With this kind of runaway coagulation, bleeding of any kind is dangerous. My blood count dropped with each round of treatment, making me vulnerable to infection. Losing more blood was unwise. The consultant prescribed a drug to halt menstruation, and also explained that the high doses of chemotherapy I was being prescribed could affect my fertility. I thought about not bleeding, and equated it with my body not working, of it failing. A break from menstruation felt like a moratorium on one aspect of being female. There are gaps in my memory from this time. Things my brain hasn’t allowed me to hold on to. The name of the drug in question is long forgotten so I type a vague search term into Google: ‘drugs to stop periods’ and ‘cancer’ – it appears instantly. It happens every time I do these searches for multi-syllable drugs or obscure treatment names that elude me. When they flash up on screen, there is instant, uneasy recognition.

  Allowed home from hospital, I had to give myself daily anticoagulation injections that went like this: wipe skin with alcohol swab, open disposable needle, insert into vial, withdraw syringe, flick to disperse air bubbles, pinch thumbful of stomach skin, insert needle and push. With subcutaneous jabs, I rarely saw blood, except for the occasional tiny orb at the point of entry. I owned a sharps bin in garish yellow and blue, with a Warning! sign on the front. Like the sanitary bins in toilet cubicles, these boxes are about safety, but also about concealment. A reminder that my blood, peripheral or menstrual, is a biohazard.

  O+

  In the ‘after’ part of illness, my vocabulary expanded. There were new words every day: embolism, infarction, neutrophils, anthracyclines. Words to describe things I couldn’t see. There were needles – hundreds of them. Blood culture tests that looked like Tabasco sauce bottles full of vinaigrette. The Hickman exited my chest, reminding me of the Borg in Star Trek. When I could not eat, I was fed a complex liquid through it. The container resembled an old milk bottle. The Hickman caused a haematoma the size of a golf ball, a soft mass of old, curdled blood. I rolled my fingers over it; my skin felt velvet.

  I’ve had blood transfusions for various surgeries, including the hip replacement. Having a previous lung clot meant taking a pass on full anaesthetic. During the five-hour surgery I was sedated, but mid-operation, I woke up. Not fully, but enough to know I was awake, and to wonder what was wrong with the spinal block, or if this was some sort of chemical trip, to feel a shove in the area where a surgeon was trying to insert my new joint. ‘Who’s pushing me?’ I slurred. The dosage was hastily topped up and I slipped back under the waves. I lost a lot of blood. In the recovery room afterwards, a blue-scrubbed nurse explained that my colour was a concern and set up a transfusion. I drifted back into the etherised calm and woke to a bag of blood swinging on an IV stand above my head. Bright and fierce, its own plastic heart.

  Blood’s redness is caused by the iron-containing protein haemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the lungs. Whenever I saw the word written down, it appeared mixed up. HaemoGOBLIN: an evil sprite lurking in my blood vessels, casting spells. When I think of these red cells, crowding through veins, of blood throbbing in my ears, a vein jumps in my arm, and I think not of the sound, or the rise and fall of skin, but only of the sheer redness beneath.

  O-

  On the haematology ward, the blood tubes have colour-coded bands and are stacked in neat rows.

  Purple (full blood count)

  Light blue (coagulation)

  Ochre (virology)

  Green (plasma)

  Pink (blood group and cross-match, in case of transfusion)

  Needle in arm – You’ll just feel a scratch – I look away from my skin to the rainbow line of branded tubes: VACUETTE. Every time a nurse fills one with my blood, I want to ask, ‘Wouldn’t The Vacuettes be a great name for an all-girl punk band?’ But I never do. I try not to focus on the extraction. Vacuette could also be the name of a French heroine in a romance novel or slang for dim mean-girls. My vein resists and the needle goes astray. Avoiding the puncture, and the blood on my arm, I focus instead on the blue and yellow sharps bin, and recall team colours:

  Football: Wimbledon, Mansfield Town, Oxford United.

  GAA: Roscommon, Wicklow, Longford, Clare, Tipperary.

  Vacuette. I turn the word over, assuming it comes from ‘vacuum’, as in void; an empty place waiting to be filled. Its purpose only complete on the receipt of blood.

  American artist Barton Beneš (1942–2012) was interested in the idea of receptacles-as-art. In exploring the possibilities of such a minute space, he used his work to make a social and political point; to give agency to his personal situation through his art. During his life, Beneš’s main medium was sculpture, but when he was diagnosed as HIV positive, he changed tack. He reached for things around him that represented what was happening in his blood. Palette (1998) is a traditional artist’s palette covered in capsules and pills, made not from paint, but from Beneš’s own HIV drugs. In two versions of Talisman (1994), antiretroviral drug capsules are intertwined with beads and US dollars to resemble rosary beads. Beneš’s tools are deliberate: a means to link religion and faith to illness, yes, but also commentary on the exorbitant cost of HIV drugs in the 1980s. If medication is used as commodity why not use it as art?

  To me, Beneš’s most arresting work began when he started to use his own blood, initially in pieces like Transubstantiations, 3, where a syringe of his HIV+ blood is shown with coloured feathers attached. It appears less as medical hardware and more as an arrow, with the fletched feathers suggestive of a Native American weapon. The religious is both routine and ritualistic in Beneš’s art, not just as a source of hope, or healing, but connected to Jesus’s bleeding on the cross – the open wound in his side analogous to the ongoing AIDS crisis. In Crown of Thorns (1996) Beneš took this further by weaving needles and IV tubes full of his infected blood into a crucifixion crown, to produce a delicate and devastating piece of work.

  In the 1980s, AIDS decimated the gay community in his adopted city of New York. In its early days, many didn’t know they’d been infected. Beneš lost swathes of friends – including his lover – to the disease, and his art was an attempt to come to terms with all the loss. ‘I never knew what to do about AIDS. It was a hard subject for me,’ he once told CNN. Proximity to the horror of what was happening to his community, the incomprehension, the reckoning with his own illness, led to the most compelling of pieces, the blood-art series Lethal Weapons (1992–7). It presents thirty receptacles containing his and other people’s HIV+ blood, including Silencer, 1993 (water pistol), Essence, 1994 (perfume atomiser), Holy Water, 1992 (holy water bottle), Absolute Beneš, 1994 (miniature bottle of Absolut vodka), Venomous Rose, 1993 (joke flower) and Molotov Cocktail, 1994. Humorous and poignant, the show’s European tour was controversial. Sweden’s health minister shut it down, while tabloids dubbed Beneš an ‘Art Terrorist’. One newspaper called it an ‘AIDS Horror Show’, but Beneš took objects of romance, comedy and religion, and repurposed them as art. How else should you confront your own mortality through art? Or respond to the premature ending of a life?

  On the night of my leukaemia diagnosis, I could not face telling my parents the news. Fearing their reaction, I asked the nurse to. I readied myself in my bed, waiting for them to appear around the curtain. I will never forget their faces, their incomprehension and tears. Amid all the wrongness of that moment, I knew something was required of me. To hide my fear and offer them a glimpse of a future none of us knew had any certainty. I have no memory of this but my mother told me years later that I looked into
her face and said, ‘I’m not going to die. I’m going to write a book.’ To commit to writing, or art, is to commit to living. A self-imposed deadline as a means of continued existence. It has taken me a long time to write that book and here I am, so very far from that awful night.

  Art is about interpreting our own experience. Upon entering hospitals, or haematology wards, our identity changes. We move from artist or parent or sibling to patient, one of the sick. We hand over the liquid in our veins to have it microscoped and pipetted. Beneš used his art as tenancy. If hospital tubes could house his blood, so could his own work. Beneš knew that if his blood had to be anywhere other than in his veins, he might as well use it as an aesthetic agenda; a declaration of possession.

  AB+

  Growing up in a Catholic country, it’s understood early on that blood is highly symbolic. No member of the faithful is ever allowed to forget that Jesus bleeds: from the crown of thorns on his head to the wounds in his hands and feet. It is said that as he hung on the cross, a Roman soldier pierced his side and blood and water flowed out of him. Life-giving fluids, both elemental constituents of the body. The act of bleeding makes him mortal, vulnerable, and more like ‘one of us’. Whenever the word ‘blood’ is used in the Bible, it refers to Jesus’s self-sacrifice. ‘Blood of Christ’, for Christians, is literally Jesus giving himself up to save their tainted souls.

  Take this, all of you, and drink from it,

  for this is the cup of my Blood,

  the Blood of the new and ever-lasting covenant,

  that will be shed for you and for all,

  so that sins may be forgiven.

  Do this in memory of me.

  I am a much-lapsed Catholic and have not attended Mass in decades, but when I go to funerals or weddings, every word of this incantation still rises up from memory. I could recite it if I had to. Even the most established and conservative of religions are deeply embedded in ritual. The Eucharistic rite of Mass is almost tribal, and I imagine drums and burning bonfires when I hear it. It mimics voodoo, blood magic and sorcery. Kneeling on hundreds of pews over the years, I’ve been deeply suspicious. The line about ‘the cup of my blood’ makes me think of Macbeth’s witches. Double, double toil and trouble. Transubstantiation is mere sleight of hand: a wine-to-blood illusion that is based purely on faith. A congregation must believe that a communion wafer metamorphoses into flesh, and a gold goblet of wine becomes the red cells of Jesus. This is a big ask, requiring a collective suspension of disbelief, and the same blind faith that makes people believe in immortality, or an interventionist God.

  A friend’s father told me recently about how, as a child, his sister almost severed his fingers with a hatchet when they were chopping sticks. A local woman had a ‘blood prayer’ and his mother carried him in her arms to the woman’s house, leaving a scarlet trail down the street. The prayer is said to stop bleeding in humans and animals, and can only be imparted from a person of the opposite sex. It goes:

  Our Lord Jesus Christ that was born in the

  stable in Bethlehem, baptised by St John in

  the River Jordan, stop this blood of

  in the name of Jesus Christ.

  My friend’s father said the blood gush ceased immediately, and his fingers – and life – were saved.

  AB-

  A box arrives in the post, containing a plastic test tube, which I have to fill to a dotted line with the right amount of saliva. Who do you think you are? Doctors have said enough over the years to make me curious about my DNA and what’s in that double helix. I register the tube online, and go to return the box to the US company. Outside the post office, traffic bustles around me, and people pass who will never know the detail in their chromosomes. I pause for a moment, not so much a hesitation as a reflection, and drop the package into the green mouth of the post box.

  Doctors decided on a two-prong approach to treat my APML, employing a combination of standard chemotherapy – in oversized syringes of red and green that look like Gulliver props – and a relatively new drug called ATRA, which only works on this strain of leukaemia. The treatment is called the Spanish Protocol, because Latin American and Iberian people have been shown to have a higher incidence of the disease. I am fascinated by where this Hispanic streak might have come from. In Irish myth, the first colonisers of our island were the Milesians. In the medieval Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of the Taking of Ireland’), they were said to be Gaels who travelled here from Iberia, onwards from southern Russia. Others cite sailors who settled here after Spanish Armada ships sank off the Irish coast in the sixteenth century. There is no definitive proof of either this theory or my ancestry, but author and filmmaker Bob Quinn in Atlantean writes of an ancient sea-trade route from North Africa up through the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland. He notes common characteristics (including a Berber influence) as a possible Hiberno-Iberian population. For days, I refresh the DNA website waiting for my results.

  My daughter was born a whole month premature, tiny and incubated, a curled ball of flesh. A paediatrician came to examine her and, glancing at her spine, or her skin, or some other unknowable part of her, declared: ‘I see she’s not a true Celt.’ Post-surgery, I was drained, groggy and full of opiates. Not alert enough to ask what this meant. If she wasn’t a Celt, what was she? Along with the Iberian susceptibility to APML and my general ancestral curiosity, this throwaway judgement fed into my sending off the bubble-wrapped tube of spit.

  When the results arrive weeks later, they reveal that I am not 100 per cent Irish. The breakdown of my DNA is 91.5 per cent British and Irish, 4.2 per cent is North-Western European, a further 2.4 per cent is specifically Scandinavian, 0.3 per cent Eastern European, 0.1 per cent East Asian and Native American, and 0.1 per cent Yakut, a people of Eastern Russian. So far, so glaringly absent in terms of a Spanish or Latin population group (0 per cent for both). The results appear on a map, and I notice that all of South America is highlighted, so perhaps this is the Latin link. My haplogroup (a genetic population group of people with a common ancestor), T2e, is a sub-haplogroup of T2, more prevalent in Mediterranean Europe. I dig further, and discover that T2e has a possible link to the Sephardic Jews, who lived in Spain and Portugal around AD 1000. In the fifteenth century they were expelled and fled to Bulgaria. ‘Sephardi’ translates as ‘Spanish’ or ‘Hispanic’, from the Hebrew ‘Sepharad’. Until me, there was a deeply embedded Catholicism in my family, and I’m amused by the idea of a possible ancestral connection to Wandering Jews. Of course, I am hundreds of years distant from this, and a micro-percentage of Sephardic DNA did not make my white blood cells rebel. Nor did this minuscule amount of Yakut or Scandinavian consanguinity have anything to do with my daughter not being authentically Celtic.

  At the time of writing this essay, my best friend’s husband was dying. He was only forty, but a particularly virulent cancer that kept returning had eventually cornered him. Hospice staff are experts in end-of-life signs; they explain how extremities will grow cold as blood starts to leave the hands and feet, moving towards the vital organs. In the morning after his death, two days into the new year, I sat with her in the downstairs room where their bed had been moved to. In the first hours of her widowhood, we each held one of his hands. Artist’s hands that had drawn the invitations for their wedding, which had taken place just eighteen days before. His fingers still contained a suggestion of heat. His heart had beaten its last; all those miles of blood had finished their cyclical journey. This is the body at the end: blood shifting into something else. The final moments at odds with all the years and days of animation that lead to this moment. I had forgotten how, in death, the body hardens, how all that blood becomes solid, how quickly warm skin cools. I think of how our lifelong kinetic redness transforms in death. A final reinvention, a turning towards stillness, and away from the vitality in every living thing.

  Our Mutual Friend

  When people ask my husband and me how we met, we always exchange a look. At dinne
r parties, over lukewarm beers at barbecues, we know to catch the other’s eye when someone asks. The question is a rope bridge between us, and both of us know not to sway it, or to glance down.

  The look means one thing.

  You know what to say, right?

  After years of missteps, and people staring unblinkingly at us as we falter, we have learnt what words to pick. The story has been clipped and condensed; diluted to a handful of well-chosen sentences, because the whole version is too much. It still has the power to hurt after many years. And these words, dark and difficult to say, can hush a whole room. So I rarely tell the full story any more, and never when my husband is there. Instead we offer one sentence, no explanations. Perhaps it sounds deliberately mysterious, but I take some perverse delight that it suggests the mundane, when this story is the opposite of that. But it works. People rarely probe further.

  ‘Through a friend,’ we say in unison, with smiles we hope are relaxed.

  In the halls of the college arts block, the first thing I noticed about Rob was his height. The way he stooped to hide his stature, as all shy, tall people do. In a long-sleeved top with a wine trunk and mustard sleeves, he looked like a children’s TV presenter. Fair-haired, serious, with a sibilant lisp. I mistook his shyness for arrogance, and steered clear.

  Months later, we found ourselves on the same island. Every year thousands of Irish college students head for the East Coast of America in search of work. We were on Martha’s Vineyard, a WASP-y idyll off the coast of Massachusetts. It was wealthy and quiet off-season, but in summer, the population swelled with students – like me – working two or three jobs. Days off were rare, nights even more so, but at a party thrown by other Irish students, there was this tall boy again. He was trying to retract his height, hiding his inches in the dark of a wooden hallway. We met up many nights after that, and bonded over music and books, eventually beginning a tentative, non-committal relationship. He confessed that he found the island suffocating. America had promised adventure but this place wasn’t it. It had no pulse, and a big city further down the coast was calling his name.