Read Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood for Free Online Page B

exception of sleeping pills, I’d never once considered taking any of his medications—and there were a couple of tempting ones, including Vicodin, which he used to treat his neuropathy pain. But this was different: a little instant vigor.
It’s just a vitamin shot,
I told myself as I reached for the vial in our kitchen cabinet.
    The B 12 injections were a new therapy for Steve. At his doctor’s suggestion, he had been using over-the-counter oral B 12 supplements together with a B 12 nasal gel, intended mainly as an antidote to drug-induced fatigue. He’d found the nasal gel messy, though, felt no less tired, and wondered, understandably, how much of the vitamin his body was even absorbing. His doctor’s solution: a prescription for full-strength B 12 , a single one-milliliter injection per week. We picked it up that same day along with a year’s supply of needles, a box of multiple pouches, the syringes within loose like Halloween candy. Steve’s doctor had taught me how to give him the shots, and I’d already done it several times, the last one just the day before. I was a natural, even a tad smug about it. I had no fear of needles, never have, a trait reinforced by the fact that Steve, unflappable in most things, was creeped out by them. He couldn’t even look when I gave him his shot.
    In the semidarkness I grabbed one of the syringes, popped off the cap, and jabbed the needle through the glass vial’s gray rubber top. I felt weirdly proud of myself; I’d come up with a brilliant solution for being sleep-deprived.
This is going to make me feel so much better!
I pulled back the plunger and watched, ebullient, as the syringe filled with the bright red medicine, foaming at the top like a glass of Strawberry Crush. I tapped out the bubbles. Oops, I’d forgotten the rubbing alcohol. I set the syringe on the countertop. Returning from the bathroom, I decided not to give myself a shot in the arm, as I would Steve, but in my butt, so he wouldn’t notice. I wanted to hide it from him.
    I pulled down my sweats, swiped a soaked cotton ball on my right cheek, pushed the needle in, pressed the plunger, and just as quickly pulled it out. There: a dewdrop of dark red blood, visual proof that the injection had dived through my white skin. I could almost see fizzy particles of B 12 swimming to my heart, my eyes, my limbs, revitalizing me. I smiled at the imagined bursts of energy that would take me through the long day ahead. I slapped on a small bandage, restored the cap to the syringe, turned on the overhead light, and opened the kitchen cabinet.
    And that’s when I looked closely at the box of needles. Inside were two open pouches, one with new syringes, one with used. I had reached in blindly, grabbing the first needle I’d felt—a dirty one, I was now sure.
    Already, I pictured, a speck of Steve’s blood had entered my circulatory system. I shivered uncontrollably as it raced through my veins, pumped through my heart, seeped into my lungs, swept into my arteries, all the while multiplying, infecting every cell, flooding my body with HIV. What rose from the pit of my stomach and caught in my throat was not bile but blood, thick and sour. It tasted like fear.
    I held my breath, as if to choke off all emotion. The moment I exhaled, fear filled the room. Had Steve walked in at that second, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he’d have been overcome, too. I was having a panic attack; heart thrumming, ears ringing, it took all my strength just to sink into a chair.
    Adrenaline was not living up to its reputation. It wasn’t the superhuman jolt I’d have expected—that surge that allows a mother to lift a crumpled car off her injured child or that burst of mental clarity that lays out the world like precise moves on a chessboard. The reality was far from the fantasy, the latter owing heavily to the late-1970s TV show
The Incredible Hulk,
a guilty pleasure when I was in college. The transformation from scrawny scientist