Free The Blood In the Beginning by Kim Falconer

whole place reeked of it. ‘You don’t know, or you don’t want to say?’ he asked.
    Huh? I tried to clear my head.
    â€˜Relax, Ava. You’re on neutral ground. I’ll look after you while you’re here.’
    I waited a moment as the last wisps of the dream-vision floated away. Maybe I was brain damaged, because no way was he making sense. ‘I’m okay, aren’t I?’
    â€˜I’d like to run more tests.’
    I shrank back. ‘What tests?’
    â€˜Just a chest x-ray and more blood work. A DNA —’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜It won’t hurt,’ he reassured me, as if I was a frightened child.
    â€˜You do not have my permission.’ My voice upped an octave.
    â€˜Ava, it’s fine. Look at me. You’re in no danger here.’
    â€˜Easy for you to say. You’re not the one strapped to a bed.’ My throat constricted, forehead beaded with sweat.
    â€˜No one’s going to do that again.’
    â€˜You strapped me to the bed?’ I sat up, heat rushing through my limbs.
    â€˜It was that, or let you take out the entire ward.’ He levelled his eyes on me. ‘We have millions of dollars of equipment here. Couldn’t let it happen.’
    â€˜So you tied me down?’
    â€˜I stayed with you the whole time, and you are fine now. Cognizant. I won’t do anything without your consent, but you have some anomalies. Your breathing. It’s unprecedented. Also, I’m concerned about your hearing.’
    â€˜I hear, and breathe, just fine.’ I didn’t mention that my mind had switched momentarily to the Cousteau channel. He doesn’t need to know that.
    Rossi gave me a quizzical look, which I returned with a blank stare.
    â€˜You don’t have my consent,’ I repeated.
    â€˜Alright,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave it for now.’
    His penlight was out, flashing in front of me. ‘Ishihara test?’
    The Ishihara test for colour blindness was standard, but what was he doing with the penlight, counting my rods and cones? ‘I’m red-green.’
    He nodded, like it didn’t surprise him, or maybe that was just his doctor face.
    I looked at my chart while he took my blood pressure.
    â€˜Approve of your treatment?’ He pulled on the chart and I let it slip from my hands.
    â€˜Why two transfusions? My PCV …’
    His eyebrows went up. ‘Your packed cell volume?’
    â€˜Sure, it was low, but nothing a banana bag wouldn’t fix.’ I squinted at the drip rack overhead and saw a haze of fluoro. ‘Oh.’ It looked like I already had one. B vitamins were the extra zing in the IV fluids that turned them bright yellow, hence the name banana bag . But the transfusions explained some of my freaked-out disorientation. I always went a little nuts from them. Another symptom to add to my list …
    Rossi tilted his head. ‘You were … depleted.’
    â€˜How did you know?’
    He ran his hand through his shaggy hair. ‘You don’t seem very well informed.’
    â€˜And you don’t seem to be helping that.’
    â€˜Your depletion was obvious.’
    That’s supposed to fill me in? Did he check my blood slides himself and catch the very hard to detect, rare and scarcely written about auto-immune condition? Sharp, if so. ‘You’re treating my blood disorder?’
    He hesitated. ‘Is that what you call it?’
    What’s he talking about? My ultra-rare condition, hemosomic anemia, was a disorder where my red cells went into a kind of stasis and wouldn’t wake until fresh blood was in my system. It flared up every year or so — I still didn’t know why — but treatment was a whole blood transfusion, which is when the fun began. Most people don’t know that besides the usual suspects of A, B, AB or O, there are at least twenty-nine other blood types. But I’m not on any of those charts. To add to