BLOOD OF LIFE

I’m a little behind the times. Vampire novels have been hot forever and have been in everything from television to literary horror novels, yet I just came up with an idea last week that’s been extremely popular lately in a television show (based on a series of books) called “True Blood.” My idea didn’t come from my imagination though. It’s more like a realization based on personal experience.

I was given a blood transfusion.

I’ve had anemia of chronic disease from autoimmune diseases for over 20 years now. I just turned 46. A few weeks back, I had terrific gut pains and started bleeding. My husband took me to the hospital. Long story short, I ended up having a blood transfusion. Merely one unit of blood, yet the color came back into my face, and, like a magical potion, I appeared younger. I felt better, more energized. More vital. More alive.

Ironically, in the month’s prior, I’d been formerly requesting my health insurance to pay for two different treatments for anemia of chronic disease after they turned me down.

They said no again.

Then, I ended up in the ER and got a transfusion of someone else’s blood.
And it truly is the blood of life. It got me thinking about a story, as I usually do when something finally occurs to me to be true. My writer friend said, “Oh, yeah honey, that’s what True Blood is all about.”

Reminds me of Sheryl Crow’s lyrics, “It’s a black fly in your chardonnay. It’s a death row pardon one minute too late. And isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?”

But then, no story is original. Everything’s been done before. It’s the writer's personal slant on it. His or her (or them's) voice. One's individual voice. That’s what we fall in love with when we read. At least that’s what I do. I fall in love with that particular's writer's placement of words on a page. There's nothing new about words. And there's nothing like reading an entertaining story. One that endures like "Dracula" in its many individual interpretations is testament to the fact that a good story cannot be over told.

Maybe I will write a story about a new breed of vampire called vampireanemiacs.