When mathematician Tom Andrews slips and breaks his ankle on an icy Ann Arbor street, it is no ordinary fracture: for Andrews, a
hemophiliac, the fall begins a "bleed"-that is, the pooling of blood beneath the skin that can cripple a hemophiliac. During his agonizing hospital-bound
convalescence, he is doped up on codeine, a drug that sends him spiraling into reveries about his disease and the way he'd combated it with the seemingly self-destructive pursuits of his
adolescence. Yet there was a family illness that overshadowed even his: his brother's terminal kidney disorder. In order to get his parents' attention, Andrews threw himself into breaking world records (for hand-clapping)…
As I read this I entered a world where only 20, 000 others are forced to endure in the USA. That world being that of a Hemophiliac. We can never know what suffering is as Mr. Andrews does, but this… This novel is at times funny, at other times heartbreaking, but entirely wonderful. It is a shame that Tom Andrews passed away so soon after the publication of this, his first novel. He was a great…
