Blood Drive

"You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. "

I saw this quote from Fred Rogers (the other Mr. Rogers you know), and I was thinking about it while I was filling out my form for donating blood at work yesterday.  I’ve never donated before, and I figured that as an adult, it was about time.

First of all, “Have you accepted money, drugs or property in exchange for sex since 1977?” is a bizarre question. 

There were plenty of other questions, but they all kind of blurred together…

After filling out the questionnaire and handing in my raffle ticket (btw, we were entered into a raffle for prizes), I followed several other donors into the donation room.

The procedure leading up to the donation itself is fairly standard.  The only unnerving thing is that no one tells you if your answers to their questions mean anything.  Like when one nurse took my pulse, looked at me funny, took it again, then asked if I was a runner.

No explanation of why she would ask or what that even meant… I had to use my not insignificant powers of deduction to figure out that she asked about me being a runner because my heartrate was low (50bpm), and she wanted to make sure I wasn’t dying in front of her…

And when the mountain of a black man that took my paperwork asked me my height/weight and whether I had donated before…  I answered as best I could, but I was REALLY distracted by the “RIDE OR DIE” tattoo on his forearm…

After sitting through the actual donation, which is pretty uneventful (if you block out the part where they insert the drain pipe they call a needle into your arm and you feel the tube get really hot with your blood), they send you to the “commissary”.  This is the smallest conference room at my office, filled with cookies and chips and juice.

This would have been more or less fine, if I hadn’t noticed this: 

I don’t remember a single person smiling while they were donating.  In fact, most of them were turning white and near unconsciousness.  One girl had to be sent home... Definitely not smiling. Creepy.

But I did my good deed for the day.  I hope it saves a life.