Giving Blood

1. blood cells 2, 2. red blood cell, 3. Red and white blood cell decorations, 4. White & Red Blood Cells

Today I donated blood for the first time. I've always wanted to, but throughout high school and college I weighed less that 110 pounds, so they wouldn't take me. I also have super low blood pressure, although it's never bothered me at all, and apparently that's an issue as well. Today the phlebotomist had to take my pressure twice to get a high enough reading. Next time I will chug a drink and run around outside first. It'll be fun.

The blood pressure thing is actually highly entertaining - whenever nurses who don't know me take it, they tend to leap to their feet the next time I stand up and eye me warily in case I'm about to topple over. I eye them warily right back, because it is mildly frightening to have people act like I might suddenly go into freefall. I have fainted once, but it involved being up at 6 AM after about five hours of sleep, an extremely hot shower, and then blowing my hair with my head upside down for about seven minutes and then cleverly flipping my head back up really fast! Note: do not try this at home. Predictable results ensue.

I also had a fun time talking about Mexico because I was diving in Cozumel this past January and managed to get DCI (For all the divers out there, it was undeserved. Look up "undeserved" before we segue into the conversation about whether I did anything odd. The DCI conversation is tiresome enough at this point that I may just write it up into a blog entry as some future date and redirect all questions there.) Due to the DCI, I took a day trip over to Chichen Itza and if you go to the mainland they like to ask all sorts of questions to try to screen for malaria. Pretty sure that if I had little plasmodium running around in my bloodstream I would have been tipped off by now due to, oh I don't know, the chills and the sweats. Seeing as how I would most likely have felt like shit 6-14 days after being infected.



Another confusing thing was that the nurse told me there was no test for malaria in the blood supply - don't you just do a smear and look at it??? Someone with a medical background talk me through this one, please.

Anyway, we went through some charts of Mexico and concluded that I was not going to kill anyone by trying to help them, and then I got to actually give blood! Despite my teensiness, I have good veins, so she got me right away and then I squeezed a red foam sports car for about ten minutes and then I stood up and felt fine. I grabbed some water and goldfish and drove home. No big deal, and I plan to keep giving blood from here on out! Unless my weight drops too much, but judging by how much ice cream I just polished off, I think I'm safe. I'd like to encourage everyone to look up their local options for giving blood. In Colorado you should use the Bonfils site to find a convenient location for you. I gave at a location on the West side of 28th street and North of Valmont. It's in the same shopping center that has Glacier, Rags, and the Bookworm, but further south. I swear it was really easy and no big deal! Sign up today! Next up: donating plasma and getting on the bone marrow donor registry.