This Is This

Soul-jolting stuff in the news to move and inspire. I saw this last week but I didn’t write it down because:

1. I was in the middle of my trilogy of stupid. Well, I posted part one, since things with three distinct parts technically can’t have a middle. It would be like half of The Bee Gees. You get Maurice and you either stop there or you get a full Barry. No half measures.2. Posting this after my day off antics and subsquent blogging makes it seem even more beautiful.

On the TV news on Wednesday night and there was a piece about how three people have contracted vCJD, a human variant of Mad Cow Disease, through blood transfusions.

The reporter’s voiceover described the case of one girl in her late teens who caught the disease many years after a she received blood from a donor. The cruel thing about vCJD is not just that it attacks your brain and motor functions, but that is can stay dormant for a decade.

In this case, the health service has written to the 100 people who may have been the possible donors for this girl’s transfusion all those years ago to warn them that they may, in time, be hit by the virus themselves, as the infected blood came from one of them.

The report showed her ageing mother and father feeding her in a specially designed bed, loving her as any other parent but trying many times harder to make her difficult life a happy one.

That’s not the incredible bit. It happens. We’re moved and we move on in care and in gratitude. We reason and we try and accept. It’s what happened next that got me and you will love it.

Her father did his bit on camera being interviewed by the reporter. Would he be outraged? Indignant? Defiant? Stoic?

Here’s what he said:

“It’s just terrible. To think someone out there is waiting to find out that they may come down with the same disease our daughter has must be very hard news to have to bear.”

Unreal.

The compassion. The humanity. The wisdom.

Hats off to the man.

The reasoning behind what he said was this:

His daughter took the transfusion to save her life. There was always a risk. She was extremely unfortunate but she lived. Now someone somewhere else will be unfortunate. The fact that it was their blood that infected the daughter is something that cannot be undone so our thoughts are with the donor, who after all is a good person and gave their blood because they were trying to save a life at a time when the medical establishment was largely unaware or the disease and not certain it could be transmitted via a transfusion.

But how did he see it that clearly when his own daughter has been disabled by the disease? His main sentient is actually benevolence towards one of those 100 donors even though no-one knows who it is yet.

He was not dwelling on the inevitable suffering of those closest to him but in living his life, practices compassion towards someone else.

And there’s me falling over and moaning for a laugh.

Also on This Is This
He is learning and time will fly. Then he will fly. Every week now is a like a day - a day in which the hours are short.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 24th, 2005 at 2:39 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.