"A pint, that's very nearly an armful!" as Tony Hancock lugubriously put it in his classic "The Blood Donor" sketch.
I'm off this morning to give blood. Just in connection with the usual round of tests for my Type 1 diabetes. Not as a donor, ever again, it seems by today's BBC headline. Today my blood was officially declared unfit to grace the veins of anyone but myself!
Click to read "M.E. PATIENTS FACE UK BAN ON DONATING BLOOD"
M.E. doesn't make the news every day. When it does, the invisible community of M.E. patients often breathes a collective sigh of dread, if they are up to it. We wonder, what will the media manage to mock in the latest headline?
-Will there be a new way of getting a laugh out of "Yuppy Flu"?
-Will there be a new raft of arguments about the research required to get to the root of M.E.'s neurological causes?
-Will XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) be thumbs up or thumbs down as the culprit this time?
-Or will we shudder with impotent grief at another wave of generalised attack aimed at real benefit bludgers, who, of course, some misinformed angry people will see as including all those hardworking, taxpaying members of society who from this devastating illness and others find themselves forced to claim invalidity benefit reluctantly, completely against their nature or aspirations?
Blogging for a few minutes on a good day or preaching for an hour a month does not, believe it or not, constitute the abilty to work full or often even part time. If only! I know, because year after year before diagnosis I drove myself back to working again and again before another complete collapse.
It got to the point when I was so obviously ill to all my colleagues and parishoners around me, they used to beg me to leave late meetings early. I so hate letting people down that I was thrown into despair at how to do all I was obliged and delighted normally to do while my body and mind were unable to stay upright, too sick with disorientating exhaustion to sleep, caught in crippling pain, uncoordinated, feverish, spaced out, dizzy and nauseous and increasingly unable to perform all the work I so love, or indeed, any work consistently.
Today the headline leaves no doubt. M.E. is real. So real that the health authorities are banning all M.E. patients, in a crash or in remission (i.e."cured" enough to function for a period, hopefully indefinitely or permanently, in "boom" after "bust"), from giving blood. One day soon, we will know exactly what virus or gene is triggering this hellish disease and be in a position to conquer it. (Though cancer and the common cold give us less optimism to hold our breath for that in our lifetimes!). I'm an optimist, though, and I have to believe these headlines are little beacons on the way.
Meanwhile I will go on doing what I can to pace myself into another period of remission. My prayer is that when it comes, it will be forever. My determination is that on that day, I will not be sucked into the arrogance of the "cured" which harangues those still gripped by the illness to "do what I did, and look, I'm fine".
If I had done that every time in my life when I too appeared "cured" when in remission, I would have hurt and possibly destroyed the hope and joy in many with whom I can now empathise.
Together, one day, we will dance in the sunshine and have our full lives restored to us and be more than overjoyed to graft gleefully in the valleys where we are needed.
Maybe one day, too, we will be able to give "very nearly an armful" again to save our neighbour.
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