Tainted blood

The Cries of the Blood; A Lament Through the Veins

I am the Blood.

I flow.

I carry the memories of a body, the whispers of life itself,

And yet, today, I am violated, injected with poisons masked as cures.

I remember the first sting,

the cold bite of the needle,

how it pierced the skin and tore a small rift in my home.

I surged, I recoiled,

But the hands of those who claimed to heal

were clumsy, blind, and indifferent.

Oh, how they boasted of knowledge,

of training, of sterile sanctity!

Yet their hands trembled,

their eyes skipped over charts as if my pulses were numbers,

not the blood of a living soul.

I twisted in veins I had once protected,

My crimson rivers roil with fear.

Every injection, every careless drip of chemicals,

It was a betrayal.

I screamed in whispers no human could hear,

My cries echo through the hollow chambers

of lungs and heart.

I am not just fluid.

I am life.

I am memory.

I am oxygen and warmth and the very code that keeps bones from crumbling.

And yet, I was drowned in saline,

coated in drugs I did not ask for,

my essence corrupted by negligence.

I recall the room — sterile lights flickering,

a machine hissing and beeping like the heartbeat of some cruel god.

I watched, helpless, as error upon error cascaded:

the wrong dosage, the misread chart, the carelessness

that sent shivers of pain through every artery.

I sang to the marrow,

pleaded with the heart to endure,

but it throbbed, weak and betrayed,

for even I, mighty and endless,

cannot withstand hands that falter.

Yet I endured.

I flowed through pain like a river over jagged rocks,

My song is a mixture of anguish and defiance.

I carried the whispers of the liver,

the fears of the lungs,

the silent prayers of the kidneys.

We all whispered together,

for I am not alone,

and in our murmurs lay the truth:

We were harmed, but we were alive.

The first night,

I felt death brush against my edges,

a cold shadow creeping through the veins.

The doctors murmured about “complications,”

and I laughed — bitter and hot — for I knew it was negligence,

not fate, that hunted us.

I remember the taste of fear in my own fluid,

thick and coppery,

mixing with the chemical tang of medicaments.

I recoiled from the saline that was meant to heal,

for even healing could be death when handled wrongly.

I howled in silence,

a torrent of unheeded warnings

that no stethoscope could detect.

But I learned something in the silence:

Even when the hands of those who heal fail,

I am resilient.

I am made of the same elements that shaped the stars.

Though I bleed and burn,

Though I scream and fade,

I carry hope in every cell,

And life refuses to surrender quietly.

I remember the day the error was recognized.

The hands that hurt me paused,

eyes widening in belated horror.

I surged then, not in pain, but in hope,

for recognition is the first spark of redemption.

They tried to patch what was broken,

to pour in balms and antidotes,

to weave my rivers back into harmony.

It was clumsy, halting, imperfect —

But even a small act of conscience

can shift the tide of a dying current.

I flowed into veins that were trembling with new life.

I whispered apologies to organs that were bruised,

to the lungs that gasped,

to the heart that faltered.

And slowly, tentatively,

I began to forgive.

Forgiveness is not weakness.

It is the recognition that life, though fragile,

It is more potent than error.

I pulsed through arteries and capillaries,

a crimson testament to endurance.

Though I tasted death, I carried hope,

And in every cell, I carried the memory of resilience.

I sang of the negligence,

of the pain inflicted not by fate but by faltering hands.

I told my story to the marrow,

to the skin, to the silent nerves that had trembled.

And they listened.

Even as I felt myself thinning,

even as my edges frayed,

My song became a river that could never be fully dammed.

I remember my last cry —

not bitter, not angry,

but a soft, trembling note of life asserting itself:

“I was harmed.

I was betrayed.

But I endure.

I forgive.

And I will return,

in every pulse, in every heartbeat,

in the echo of life itself.”

They patched the veins,

and I felt them again,

The hands that had hurt, now gentle, trembling, aware.

I whispered my secrets,

my pain, my fury, my hope,

and they listened — truly listened —

as if for the first time they recognized

That blood is not merely fluid.

It is a witness.

It is history.

It is life.

I flowed into recovery,

slowly, painfully,

But surely.

I remembered every insult, every careless touch,

But I also remembered the smallest spark of humanity,

the doctor who paused, the nurse who noticed,

The patient who survived.

Even as my edges frayed, even as the threat of death lingered,

I carried hope in my veins.

And when I finally left the body that had been my prison,

I did not fade into oblivion.

I became a song,

a river of remembrance and endurance,

a testament to life that refuses to be silenced.

For though negligence may wound,

and though the hands of humans may falter,

life — and blood — persists.

And every drop that falls carries the message:

“We suffer, we cry, we endure —

But in hope, we live again.”