The USC-UCLA Blood Drive goes on until game day, so contact your
local donation center post haste. There’s some sort of
competition this week, and for every unit of blood we donate, UCLA
gets points, and then those points are tallied and after
they’re added up … uhhh … The point is that if it’s
a quantifiable, hierarchical winner/loser structure, it has to be
important, so of course I want to jump in on it.
Like a lot of you, I thought blood banks were simply a front for
vampires to feed the “craving,” but now I realize
there’s more to it, and it’s not just because of this
competition.
I first met Kevin Garvey last year while we studied abroad in
Tokyo at the same university. Instead of an introduction, I
congratulated him on his “pale, East Coast pallor.”
First impression notwithstanding, we became good friends over the
course of the year.
In addition to our stay in Japan, we discovered we had both
attended all-male Catholic high schools. On one occasion after my
patented insensitivity had offended a mutual friend, he explained
to her, “The thing you got to understand about Hector is, he
is a product of an all-guy school.”
When you’re in a foreign land, naturally you rally around
similar people. My experiences with Kevin ran along a parallel
track for a year to the point where we even got native girlfriends
around the same time.
With our group of fellow gaijin (foreigners), we’d hit
downtown Tokyo, dancing and drinking until the trains ran again
around 5 a.m. Then we’d compare our respective fortunes with
the ladies during the one-hour train ride back, followed by the
15-minute bike ride (hell on a hangover) from the station to
home.
We had each other’s back. One weekend he held the umbrella
while I puked beside a police station in the rain; another night, I
babysat as he slept in a shady alley outside a shady club, vomit
running down his leg.
In the last few months in Japan, Kevin noticed a lump growing in
his neck. When he got back to Buffalo, N.Y., in July of this year,
he was diagnosed with leukemia. Soon thereafter he began intensive
treatment and eventually had to take a sabbatical from school.
In early November, I took a week off to visit him in Buffalo. He
warned me, though, that because the chemotherapy had killed his
white blood cells (the main immune system cells), I would have to
be completely healthy because he could not risk exposure to any
disease.
Seeing him for the first time since Japan was a shock. The day
he picked me up, he almost couldn’t come to the airport
because he had spent the morning throwing up. He hadn’t slept
properly in days (a side effect of his medication), would
hallucinate because of the morphine, couldn’t eat because of
the nausea, and had recently been plagued by headaches whose source
the doctors couldn’t pinpoint. He even got paler, which I had
thought impossible.
I accompanied him and his mother a few times to the hospital, a
daily routine for Kevin by now. Of course, nothing is ever routine
with cancer. Procedures that should have lasted an hour could
unexpectedly turn into five or six.
The worst by far were the lumbar punctures, also called spinal
taps. They stuck needles into Kevin’s spine while he was in
the fetal position to see whether his spinal fluids were normal.
He’d be out of commission for days afterward.
There were different meds he took for pain, nausea, anxiety,
sleep, to go to the bathroom, and the list goes on.
One day on my trip, Kevin’s dad drove us to see Niagara
Falls. That’s when I really pitied Kevin: In SoCal, the high
school rite of passage is TJ; for Kevin, it meant driving over the
border into Canada. Man, that’s sad.
Anyhoo, every unit of blood helps tremendously, and for the
first time I’m realizing that in all the time I wasted in
ineffectual walkouts and protests and angry chalkings, I could have
made a tangible difference in the world.
I’ve never given blood before, so I would like to have
someone there to hold my hand as I scream like a little girl when I
see the needle during this blood drive.
You could sit there studying the whole time or be a blood buddy
with me.
There are other Kevins out there; let’s get their
back.
If you want to pass on any well-wishes to Kevin or join the
donation train, e-mail Leano at [email protected].