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It takes around four years for people to recover their well-being after the saddest events in life, such as health problems, bereavement and large financial losses, research finds.
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In contrast, the happiest events in life — marriage, childbirth and a major financial gain — typically only provide a boost to happiness for two years.
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The human body has around ten pints of blood in it—or “units,” as doctors prefer. Women tend to have less blood than men and children have less blood than adults, but in all cases, a healthy person can lose around 15 percent of their blood without much effect. (Women commonly lose that much in childbirth.) At around 30 percent blood loss, though—three to four units—the body starts to go into compensatory shock to protect its vital organs. The heart rate increases to make up for low blood pressure, breathing gets faster and shallower, and capillaries and small blood vessels constrict to keep blood where it’s needed most, in the heart, lungs, and brain. If you push your fingertip into the skin of a healthy person, you will leave a white spot that refills with blood almost immediately. If you do the same to someone in compensatory shock, the white spot lingers, even if the person seems functional and clear-minded.
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“This is the emergency,” Wilson said and started readying something called a Cordis line, which is used during massive transfusions. On some level I knew something was seriously wrong, but my brain wasn’t working well enough to understand that I was dying. I didn’t have any grand thoughts about mortality or life; I didn’t even think about my family. I had all the introspection of a gutshot coyote. Dr. Wilson reappeared above me upside down and put a transparent plastic sheet over my face to keep the area sterile. Then he pushed down hard on the right side of my neck to image my jugular with an ultrasound probe so that he could slide a needle into it.
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The doctors in Hyannis knew I was bleeding massively into my abdomen but didn’t know from where. They couldn’t fix me until they found that out, but eventually organs fail, the lungs and chest fill with fluid, and the heart stops. You can survive a bad fall or a car accident and suffocate days later from pulmonary edema. My father’s sister, Renata, killed herself at age sixteen by throwing herself out an apartment window in New York City in 1947. She fell four stories but landed on the roof of a car, which broke her fall. When she regained consciousness and realized what had happened, she became desperate to live, but it was too late. Her lungs were filled with fluid and there was nothing the doctors could do. Renata died screaming for her mother, who was physically restrained in the next room and calling back to her. Her stepfather sat calmly reading a newspaper until it was over.
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