The Two Kinds of Decay

The Taste

The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.

For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn’t help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.

The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very slowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body.

By the time I had the permanent line, the cold infusions went in very close to my heart. I need to describe that feeling, make a reader stop reading for a moment and think, Now I understand how cold it felt.

But I’m just going to say it felt like liquid, thirty degrees colder than my body, being infused slowly but directly into my heart, for four hours.

The albumin had a taste. To be more specific, the albumin had two tastes, because the hospital bought albumin from two different manufacturers.

Both companies used the same 500 cc clear glass bottles, which were sealed at the narrow end with rubber drums that could be sterilized and punctured with sterile needles and connected to sterile tubing.

One company’s albumin was the color of light beer and the other company’s was the color of lager. And the dark albumin tasted worse.

I never could decide whether it was chemical bad or organic bad.

I had to taste it for three or four hours, unabatedly, and there was nothing I could do to change the taste of it. It wasn’t touching the surface of my tongue, but it was going into the blood in my heart, which pumped it into every cell in my body. It was in my tongue.

The only thing that masked the taste of the albumin was wintergreen-flavored candy.

Tabitha, my favorite apheresis nurse, always arrived with a bag of wintergreen candies, individually wrapped. She picked them out of the mix for me — there were red and yellow and purple candies, too, and different kinds of mint — and left a small pile of them behind, because the taste of the albumin lasted for a while after the infusion was over, and she wanted to make sure I had enough wintergreen to get through the rest of the day without having to taste any albumin. Without that reminder of how I’d spent the morning.