Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Blood is Beautiful.....

+++++ Blood and gore alert. +++++
~+~ If you're squeamish, maybe you shouldn't read this part. ~+~
(mark/highlight to read following )


My right hand got the full set of teethmarks from Dog's mouth. Her name's Princess, by the way, but she doesn't really respond - don't think she knows that's her name - but we usually just call her Dog cause it's short and works just as well as Princess - which means she doesn't respond either way except occasionally and that's just to your voice and not the name...

My thumb got gouged a bit more deeply than the rest of the marks and wouldn't stop bleeding on its own while the rest were just sort of scrapes - skin cut, bled a bit but would close over on its own. I put my thumb under the tap and let the water run since I didn't want an infection but took it out when i realised it wasn't clotting and was still bleeding.
Realised that the blood wouldn't stay and form a clot when it was being washed away...

That's when I noticed the way the blood was running out...

...I mean, it wasn't seeping like droplets from a scratch or gushing like a cut artery or trickling like a punctured vein, but it was sort of spreading over the surface of my thumb from that one tooth puncture that didn't look that big, really, just deeper than it looked, I guess.

The red just spread across the surface of my thumb like a sheet, not rivulets following the wrinkles of the knuckle as I thought,

...but like a piece of silk, smooth like cellophane, spreading out over the contours.

Then I thought, that's really nice, that red.

Beautiful. Like art. Blood is beautiful... I really think it is.

That bright red--- I ran my thumb under the tap again to wash it off and watched it spread again.
So different from the darker line of blood running through the tube when I go donate blood.

My mom came over to see but I ran it under the tap again and pressed my left thumb over the puncture and asked, well, told her to get me a plaster. I didn't think it was a good idea to let her see it since she would only have nagged and made a fuss. (She gets jumpy when I'm holding a knife cutting fruit.) She wanted to paste it on for me so I let her. Only, it was too loose and not really keeping the blood there long enough to clot so i peeled off one end and rewrapped it more tightly once she left the kitchen. The gauze inside was soaked by then and little drops of red squeezed out of those little airing holes on the back of the plastic when I tightened it. I rinsed it off under the tap again and the water flushed out some of the blood from the gauze as well, tinting the water red so I stopped and dried the plastered thumb off on my towel, which was a bad idea since I squeezed some more blood out and got my towel bloody. Looks like I was having a nosebleed on it.

Later that day, some of the scratches that still had skin attached started to seal back together. I could feel little bumps at the edges of a few of them and one of them was a 2cm long line of raised skin. Another one, at the juncture of the base of my thumb and my palm, had a flap of skin, maybe 1cm long and 0.5 cm wide. It didn't feel like the scabbing over sort of swell and I thought that I might have some fur or the cotton wool's fibers trapped under it so I teased it the skin open by the edges with my fingernails and washed the hand under the tap again before smoothing them back over and making sure I got most of the buildup of plasma out. I got out a nail cutter and trimmed off the edges of some where there were bumps and cleaned off the pus/plasma fluid before leaving them alone. I also trimmed the skin off those that didn't have a chance of sealing back, meaning those that only took off the dead epidermis layer and were hanging there in danger of pulling the rest of the skin open.
When I went to shower that night applied a plaster on the skinned flaps at my ma's insistence. The next day, monday morning I mean, when I took the plaster off, I found that the 1cm flap I mentioned actually joined back together with the skin along the edge. There's some redness outlining it but other than that it looks and feels like unbroken skin with no peelable edge. Slightly raised like a little bump or mosquito bite but the skin is joined together. I find that fascinating, like the blood. Makes me think about skin grafts.
The body's capacity for repair and regeneration is really amazing, isn't it? The way a flap of skin actually joined back to the rest of it. All I can say is, wow...

...However, as interesting as regeneration is, I find myself going back to that aesthetic appreciation of blood.

Yes. I saw beauty on Sunday. The art of the living body. The flowering passage of blood across skin captured my fancy. I think... I feel... Blood is Beautiful... yes, Blood is beautiful in its redness, in its movement. Makes me want to see it again...

Hey, I was struck by a thought, does the dog bite affect my donating blood? cuz my next appointment is in about a week or two I think... Though that's not the bood I want to see. I want to see it spread, not flow constrained through a narrow tube... Whatever, donating blood helps a lot more people than my aesthetic appreciation so I'll contribute to that and when the opportunity comes for me to see the pretty red I'll remember to stop and watch it then.


~~~ Hmm... I wonder if this counts as a fetish? ...I'm kinky, aren't I? *stunned by this revelation*~~~
Signed, Blood-fetish!TY

Labels: Censored, Random thoughts

mon chef d'oeuvre
2:27 am