Yobanca Blood

Ayşa and I finally found the right door. We pushed it open into a room--empty save for a single man in a long dark rain jacket. Ayşa said something to him and he got up to find the nurse. With Ayşa translating for me, I experienced everything with a five second delay. It turned out that the man was the father of the baby that needed blood.

I couldn't speak Turkish so I just looked at the father. His face was taut with anxiety. I hadn't expected to see him but now I was glad. Ayşa and I were in the children's hospital across the street from PEÉ. A few minutes before, someone had been wandering through local businesses, pleading for anyone with AB+ blood to come and donate to a premature newborn whose mother was experiencing a bout of hypertension--or something like that. The family didn't have enough money to buy blood.

"I have AB blood," I'd said in the teacher's room at PEÉ when a secretary from the front office came through. "Could they test it to find out if I'm positive or negative?"

And so off I had gone with Ayşa, skittering down the five flights of stairs, and weaving between a massive line of traffic to the other side of the block. The hospital is a sprawling mess of rooms, corridors and waiting rooms. Electronic number boards were high on the walls, keeping track of the endless queue of people waiting to get medical attention. We were batted around like a ping-pong ball between different stations in the hospital. Finally we found the right door, and discovered the father of the baby, who summoned a male nurse.

As the male nurse was motioning me to sit in one of the chairs, I was stripping off my jacket to roll my sleeve up, and Ayşa was explaining that I wasn't sure if I were positive or negative. But then the nurse stopped dead in his tracks.

"Yobanca?" He asked, finally noticing that this pale little girl hadn't spoken a word for herself yet. Yep. She's a foreigner all right.

He asked Ayşa if I had a drivers' license. Negative. I tried to offer him my residency documents in lieu but he wouldn't take them. I stood amongst the three of them--Ayşa, the nurse, and the shaking father--trying to follow the ensuing conversation, but in vain. Of course.

From the way Ayşa inched back towards the door we'd come through, and from the way the father kept saying to us, "Çok teşekkürler, canım, çok teşekkürler (Thank you so much, dear, thank you so much)," it became apparent that we were leaving.

What about the baby?! I was trapped in helpless silence so I just took one last look at the father before we pulled the door shut behind us. I wanted to cry.

Back in the corridor, Ayşa began explaining, trying to soften the blow. I learned I was the second person to try to give blood. The mother didn't know that the baby was in danger because she was having hypertension.

"But why don't they accept yobanca blood?" I asked as we crossed the tree-lined parking lot.

"Maybe it's something about genetics, that they won't take your blood. Maybe they want a Turkish person. I don't know."

But my students that night were furious. "That nurse should be sacked. If you told the manager of the hospital, he would be sacked. The baby needs blood. That is so stupid. There is no law. If you'd had a drivers' license you could have proved that you'd done a blood test and been tested negative for AIDS... but the nurse made a story."

"Maybe he didn't think I would be disease-free? Or maybe they didn't have the money to test the blood before the transfusion," I offered. What point was there getting mad about something in which I had so, so little influence? Better to accept and move on.

"They should test the blood anyway before a baby gets it."

I could hardly argue with them about it. It was now about three hours since I had gone to the hospital with Ayşa. My students and I sat around the table in PEÉ's in-house cafe for a silent moment, wondering if the baby was still alive.

I took a deep breath and stood up. "Ok, our ten minute break is over. Let's get back to class." I led the way back to the classroom, the only place for thousands of miles where I am ever in control.