Your blood makes up about eight percent of your body weight.

When you want to be pregnant, you do not want to see blood. 

When you do not want to be pregnant, you wish for menstrual blood. 

I have been pregnant ten times. 

The first time, I was 20 years old. I longed for my period to begin. I had an abortion. 

I got pregnant soon after we threw away the contraception. It was a blighted ovum. I had a D&C and I shed blood from the surgery. 

A few months later I was pregnant again. I was using the restroom at the university where I was working on an advanced degree. The spotting started a multiple week waiting game until cardiac activity ceased.

I trickled blood from another D&C.

The total amount of blood lost during one period is usually about 60 milliliters.

That’s about 2.7 ounces, 2 shot glasses, 16 teaspoons every month. 

I couldn’t get pregnant. I spill blood through many moon cycles.

Multiple pints of chocolate milk. A few bottles of vodka. 

In Pregnancy #3, I dread every wipe, but I will shed post-op blood. I eventually get pregnant again. There is bleeding, and then there isn’t. My body knows, but it will take a few more weeks to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy.

They apply band aids over the spots where they cut through my abdomen to remove the mass from my fallopian tube.

A newborn baby will have around 1 cup of blood in its body.

My body has experienced multiple procedures and surgeries. It has been cut and stitched and explored. One out of ten people who enter a hospital will need blood, I am not that person.

Victims of severe car accidents may need up to fifty pints of blood before their condition normalizes.

I feel like a casualty that is bruised and bloodied and thrown to the side of the road. The knife of life circumstances cuts deep into my heart.

I am leaking inside.

There is no clotting agent for the sadness and loneliness that travels through my veins. 

I yearn to hold a child pumping 2,000 gallons of blood daily.

• https://www.informedhealth.org/
• https://www.lifelinebloodserv.org/blood-facts
• https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=about-the-heart-and-blood-vessels-90-P01761