What I Have Learned About Blood

a surgeon tells his story

AS A doctor, I was engaged in a busy general practice in Dallas, Texas. Often, 7 a.m. would find me in the operating room, standing across the surgical table from my associate surgeons, capped and gowned in pale green surgical garb. I remember, in particular, a cesarean section that we performed in 1965 as if it happened yesterday.

The operation was going well. Roy had made the incision quickly, encountering no serious bleeding. Now before us was the bulging uterus, protruding upward as the inner layer of the abdominal wall was opened. I glanced up to meet Roy’s eyes, just above his surgical mask, as he let out a soft breath, and exclaimed, “Would you look at that!”

My eyes, darting down, saw around the base of the straining, pregnant uterus unusually large blood vessels—almost the size of my fingers—coming up from the bottom and through the supporting ligaments. We were going to have to slice through many of those vessels, and there was going to be massive hemorrhaging.

“OK, let’s go,” Roy said. Holding out his right hand, he received a smart slap with the scalpel handed him by the surgical nurse. Each cut brought a fresh gush of blood from the large varicose vessels that had to be severed in order to open the uterus enough to get the head of the baby out.

“Jessie,” I yelled. “Call the lab and tell them to type and cross-match two units of whole packed cells.”

“Yes, doctor,” the efficient operating-room supervisor said over her shoulder as she went through the swinging operating-room doors. I glanced up to meet the eyes of the anesthesiologist. He was giving me his smiling nod of approval as he opened the valves of the IV fluid bottles to let this fluid replace the escaping precious blood. The anesthesiologist is usually responsible for the care of fluid and blood replacement when the patient is under an anesthetic. The surgeon, although the captain of the ship, is generally too busy at that time to attend to it.

The anesthesiologist, who had just given me the smile of approval, had taught us respect for blood. His belief was in the use of what he called “white blood,” Ringer’s lactate solution. It is a fluid that contains the salts, water and other ingredients necessary to replace body fluids, but it does not present the dangers of whole blood. He had repeatedly told us that if a patient did not need massive amounts of blood, then you were a fool to use anything but Ringer’s lactate to replace volume loss. I had listened to him and had learned a lot. Now I was chief of staff of the hospital, and I thought I knew just about all there was to know about blood. The operation was a success—the mother and baby lived.

“The Good Life”?

Back in those earlier years of my practice I thought I had “arrived.” On the outside everything was going well; my practice was booming and my income was growing. I had all the external evidence of success—a home with a swimming pool, a new car, a fast racing sailboat, two children—just about everything the world can give you. But in reality everything was going wrong. The strange thing is that I knew it was. Yet I kept denying it, trying to convince myself and my family that this was “the good life.”

We were on a merry-go-round. The more money I made, the more we spent. We were traveling with a fast-moving crowd. I began to drink excessively, and immorality became a way of life. At the close of that sixth year of being a big-city doctor, my whole life as I knew it came crashing down on my head. My three-and-a-half-year-old boy drowned in our swimming pool. One month later, my wife left me and our other son for one of my closest friends.

I fell into a horrible depression, one day trying very deliberately and almost successfully to kill myself by injecting morphine into my body. I was so surprised when I awakened in our hospital, asking only, “What went wrong?” In just under six short years I had climbed to the pinnacle of success, only to fall all the way back down to the bottom.

I tried everything—psychoanalysis, pills (“uppers” and “downers”), and always alcohol—to get relief from the misery of my life. Nothing worked. In one year I remarried and, hoping that my life was returning to normal, began making the same mistakes all over again. My poor wife did not know what she was getting into. She was 15 years younger than I was, and had never been married before. Now she suddenly had a ready-made family, and the new responsibilities of a doctor’s wife.

I began to build myself back up in the eyes of my associates; again my practice began to boom. My income grew toward six figures. But I still had all the same bad habits. My drinking and pill taking continued, and the immorality had never ceased. I was making my new wife an emotional and physical wreck. We soon had two children, in addition to my son from the previous marriage. We moved into a bigger house with a larger swimming pool, and bought larger cars. We spent every weekend racing sailboats, drinking heavily, and participating in late night life. We “farmed out” our children to the grandparents, who saw them more than we did. Just as long as they didn’t bother me, I was satisfied. We spent thousands of dollars on “fun”—new sailboats, snow-skiing trips and equipment—but still my life wasn’t any fun.

My moods grew more terrible. I began having a serious affair with one of my office nurses, and she demanded more and more of my time. Depression followed depression, and all the while I had this real fear that I was going to die and never really know life or what it was all about. I watched world conditions like a hawk. I knew things couldn’t go on indefinitely the way they were headed, and this only made me more depressed.

What Is the Answer?

Then one night, in a semidrunken state, my wife and I were talking in the backyard. We were both deeply depressed because of the situation the world was in. We had looked into everything—the occult, Far Eastern religions, reincarnation. I asked her to pray with me, something that we had never done before. We threw ourselves on our faces in the grass, with tears flowing profusely, begging God to hear us.

A few days later, when I came home one night from the office, my wife told me that she was studying the Bible with Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Oh, no!” I yelled. “You’ll never get rid of them. Don’t you know they’re just after our money? Anything but that.” But for some reason my wife resisted me on this and she continued her studies. I was furious and made it very difficult for her, although I didn’t physically prevent her from studying.

I was determined that I could teach my wife that I knew more about the Bible than the Witnesses did. This was strange, since I had never read the Bible through in my whole life. So, I would get up early each morning to read the Bible just so I could teach her. However, to my anger and shock, she would show me things in the Bible that I had read right over and completely missed.

The Matter of Blood

Then one night she was reading from a red book, and she quietly said: “Oh, look! Did you know that God told Noah that he was supposed to pour out the blood of animals on the ground before they could eat them?”

I was instantly defensive, and said: “Yes, that’s what I don’t like about those people; they won’t accept blood transfusions.” Now here at last was something that they couldn’t teach me. It was something I could sink my teeth into, for, after all, I thought that I knew everything about blood. I was bitter and full of pride. She knew it and didn’t say another word about the matter.

Shortly afterward, she gave me a list of blood replacement fluids that her Bible teacher had given her over the phone, and she asked me if I knew about these. It really exasperated me—to think that they thought I didn’t even know about plasma volume expanders. On the list was Ringer’s lactate, “white blood.” To the next study, her teacher brought her a little booklet called “Blood, Medicine and the Law of God,” which she asked me to read. The very next morning, when I sat down to read the Bible, I picked up that little booklet and read it from cover to cover. When I had finished, I knew it was the truth.

I had never seen the scripture ‘Keep abstaining from blood,’ and never knew about God’s commandment to Noah not to consume blood. (Acts 15:28, 29; Gen. 9:3, 4) I had thought that the prohibition on blood was only part of the old Jewish Law covenant that I knew was canceled with the coming of Jesus Christ. However, when I read the entire 15th chapter of the Bible book of Acts, all I could say was, “Well, I’ll be!” Of course, for years I had known the dangers of blood transfusions—the hemolytic reactions, the dangers of mismatched blood, and so forth. I also knew about the unnecessary blood transfusions that I had given in our hospital, and I had witnessed the hepatitis cases resulting from contaminated blood.

A Changed Way of Life

After finishing that little booklet, I wanted to talk to the woman who was studying the Bible with my wife to find out if I could ever be forgiven by God for all the bad things I had done. In time, my wife and I both began to attend her Bible study together, and we would ask all our friends to come. Sometimes we would have a whole room full of people when our study conductor would arrive. Six months after I began to study, my wife and I symbolized our dedication to Jehovah God by undergoing water baptism. Our three children looked on, sharing with us in our newfound happiness.

It has been 19 years since I began my career as a doctor, and Jehovah has brought real inner joy and peace to our lives. True, my associates in the hospital were difficult when they first found out about my becoming a Witness. But their attitude has generally turned to respect, even though I will not give blood transfusions. One of my greatest joys was discovering that the surgeon I had first associated with when starting out in practice, but whom I had not seen for years, had also become one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and was doing major surgery without blood.

Today we are a united family, serving the true God, Jehovah, and preaching about his incoming world government. I am an elder in our Christian congregation, and we are happy now with the more important things of spiritual life. Our hearts flood with gratitude to Jehovah God for all his blessings. We have found that the only blood that is lifesaving in the fullest sense is the blood of the ransom sacrifice of Christ Jesus, for it alone can give us everlasting life. (Eph. 1:7)—Contributed.

“For the soul of the flesh is in the blood, and I myself have put it upon the altar for you to make atonement for your souls, because it is the blood that makes atonement by the soul in it.”—Lev. 17:11.