The liquid Life.

In the dead silence of the room, the only sound was the faint dripping. He lay there motionless, focusing on the red trail of liquid life.

His presence at the hospital was accidental; a mischief of the fate. Looking closely at the bag that was slowly filling up, he murmured softly: Blood.

Blood; that is an oxygen circulating fluid that. Cell to cell it delivers nutrients and oxygen, giving away the gift of life. With RBCs , that carry oxygen, WBCs to fight infections and Plasma to help clotting, it is a fascinating liquid that travels silently through our veins each second of the day and yet goes unnoticed, most of the time taken for granted.

“Blood is the Santa Claus of cells.” His nanny had told her.

How many of us consider sending a silent prayer any time in the day for the flow of bloodin our bodies? Healthy blood !!

 Imagine for a moment that the blood stops cold in your body, for a minute only. Oh you couldn’t imagine that, could you? Most probably because you were dead.

But not him. He had known the importance of blood from the moment his conscious had started to work. He lost his mother to it. He learnt that he was an orphan in a very early stage of his life. The time other children spent in playing, he used to sit and wonder how his life would be different if his mother were still alive.

“How did she die?” he asked his nanny. He was 5 at that time.

“well, baby… the doctors couldn’t find blood for her.”

“why?” he asked in amazement. “there is so much blood in the world. Everyone has it. Why didn’t they give it to my mommy?”

“Oh poor baby” His nanny hugged him tight because she couldn’t think of any answer.

When he turned 18, he found that he had a passion for engineering but an obsession with blood. He didn’t want to be a doctor but he wanted to associate himself with giving relief to people. Every day he saw hundreds of people walking in and out of the hospital with a million problems.

It was definitely a mischief of the fate. He was walking past the busy street across the hospital when a boy , his own age, rushed towards him and asked “Are you O+?”  For a moment, he was blank and then he spluttered out “Yes. But why…” He couldn’t finish his sentence because of the overwhelming response. That was the first time he ever donated blood.

It had been 5 years since then. He found the way to contribute to saving lives without being a doctor. He had found the way to connect to other people and touch their lives in a beautiful unorthodox way. The WHO slogan “paint the world red” became the tagline of his life. He indulged into social cause and made it his life’s mission to motivate and encourage people to donate healthy blood after learning that 800 mothers around the globe die in pregnancy, childbirth or following childbirth with 99 percent in developing countries. Severe blood loss accounts for 31 percent of mothers' deaths in Asia. (WHO Report)

He never wanted another child to be raised motherless. One time, a young man came to him whose wife he had given blood to and said “Brother, thank you for saving my life.”

He replied with a smile. “I saved my own!” and echoes through his ears, the divine voice:

“Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.”  (Surah Al Maida. Verse:5:32)

On this World Donor’s Day, let’s make a vow to donate healthy blood to the people in need and become related to the people not by culture or religion but by blood!!