The Two Kinds of Decay

The New Machine

A new apheresis machine was delivered to the hospital. It was the manufacturer’s prototype. The company had sent it out for human trials.

This machine worked faster than the old one. Instead of withdrawing a cup of blood, cleaning it, and reinfusing it, the new machine withdrew and reinfused my blood continuously. And it could reinfuse at a faster clip because it had a built-in blood warmer. There would be no chills, no shaking.

I was the first human to use that machine.

The day the machine was delivered, Tabitha hooked me up to the albumin, gave me a wintergreen candy, and told me an engineer was coming to talk with me — one of the engineers who had designed the new machine.

She brought him upstairs and left us alone. For a moment, he just looked at me, connected to the machine he had helped invent, and I just looked at him. I was happy to be able to shake his hand, as I was using a central line and my arms were free to bend at the elbow.

He asked me how the machine felt, and I told him how good it felt to have a blood warmer, how I would miss it if I had to go back to using the old machine. I told him how good it was to know that the treatment would last two hours instead of four.

And I told him what it was like to arrive at the hospital with paralyzed legs and then to have six or seven treatments over six or seven days, using an apheresis machine made by his company, and then to walk out of the hospital on my own legs, my arms held out a little for balance.

He tried not to smile, but he smiled. I hope he felt proud. He had made something good, and it had helped me. And he had seen it — seen the moment his invention worked.

We talked about my college studies, and about his work, and about his volunteer work with the Boys Club of America. He stayed with me until a half hour was left in the treatment and then said he would go and find Tabitha. She needed to disconnect the last of the four bottles of albumin that had emptied into me, and to disconnect me from the machine, and to seal and remove the four-liter bag of my dirty plasma. Tabitha came back and did all the things she needed to do. The engineer said goodbye.

But he returned, with a bouquet of flowers.