well.....i lived in terror of the concentration camp thing having had a great-uncle and his wife who survived it....i developed a massive panic anxiety disorder and if circumstances did not evolve the way they did i would have been dead long ago (slowly suicidal, anorexic, which sufficiently damaged me so that at this time in life i have a couple rather serious issues) thankfully a wonderful man came into my life and saved me.
my first response on a personal gut level to organ transplants was extreme squeamishness. it did seem cannibalistic to me, but gradually i came to realize that every seven years or so our cells have completely morphed into different ones, and that if the transplant is accepted, it becomes part of the individual.
blood, i really always avoided thinking about it too much. early on in life it was just taboo, like so many other things, and as a child growing up was not big in my mind. in early adulthood you feel invincible, and i was always in excellent health so really didn't think much about it. of all the people i knew who refused blood for surgeries, they all came out just fine, so again i felt no big deal. as they developed the liaison committees and got more involved in trying to prove the medical superiority of the position, frankly it got rather tedious. i always had the feeling that science was being cherry-picked to match dogma. at this point in life i truly believe that medical technological and scientific discoveries and progress are to the betterment of humanity and i appreciate the fact that so many diseases that were killers are now little glitches. even growing up - polio was such a devastating problem - and now it is virtually unheard of. if i come into a situation where the medical community believes that blood is the answer, then so be it.
