Codeine Diary

by Tom Andrews

"In Codeine Diary, award-winning poet Tom Andrews gives a riveting and often hilarious account of living fully under the shadow of hemophilia." "Codeine Diary is a lyrical and haunting memoir of one man's refusal to succumb to the constraints of his disease. Andrews learned early that ordinary life is a perpetual, fragile miracle, which drove him to race motorcycles and play in a punk band as a teenager - pursuits most hemophiliacs would regard as foolhardy at best. But while Andrews was "a poster child for bad insurance risks," he was considered the healthy one in his family: his brother suffered from a devastating and ultimately fatal kidney disorder. In fact, the two diseases were eerily symmetrical: there were days when Andrews would suffer a bleed while his brother's blood would not stop coagulating. Having acquired hemophilia through a "spontaneous mutation" and not hereditarily, having avoided HIV, which nine out of ten severe hemophiliacs contracted in the early 1980s, Andrews