Blood

My friend John lives in D.C. and is in Utah for his spring break. John and I have been co-workers in more than one country and have been friends for several years. After about a half hour, any given conversation can quickly turn towards absurdities, and these conversations, in turn, almost invariably lead to us heaving with laughter and wiping tears from our eyes.

The other day we talked about blood.

Maybe it was all those cuts on my hands that caused our conversation to veer off on the topic, but I don’t recall which of us broached the subject. Either way, I am grateful it happened. The general point of our conversation was… Imagine a movie (alternatively, a series of commercials for the blood bank) that exposes the people and subculture found in the blood drawing industry. It could explore the situations and experiences that you would never hear about in passing conversation with your neighborhood phlebotomist. Close your eyes and imagine the following montage (the music would be something you would hear in a chewing gum commercial):

• After a long day of collecting blood, one of the guys at the blood bank pokes a bag of blood with a small needle and laughs as he sprays his fellow workers with a shower of corpuscles by squeezing the bag tightly in his hands. It has been a boring day and, at the sight of spraying blood, everyone joins in the lively fun. Soon the workers are drenched from head to toe in misappropriated blood deposits but are rolling on the floor with rich smiles and hearty laughter.
• At an evening work party some little rascal really gets the party going with small balloons filled with blood. The girls scream and giggle as the guys try to pelt them from afar, flirting mercilessly.
• On his first day at work, one new employee finds himself tuckered out with the day barely half spent. In desperation he dumps a cooler full of samples on the floor in a quiet, dark corner and curls up for a nap on his makeshift waterbed.
• Going to the after-work softball practices pays off for the blood bank team when they take first at the local tournament. As the manager/coach is walking onto the field to congratulate his team, two irreverent teammates douse him with a cooler full of ice-cold blood. Boy was he surprised! His reaction says both, “How could you do this to me!?” and, “I should have seen that one coming… good game boys.”

We laughed and laughed. The movie, unfortunately, would probably have to be rated R despite a major lack of drugs, violence, sex, or language. There would just be no way around the blood (read by the MPAA as “Prolonged scenes of intense gore”). Maybe if it were done tastefully it could be whittled down to a PG-13, but still it would be hard to market to mass audiences. Also, I’m not sure I would want to be affiliated with a movie like this in the first place.