Bloody Awful
Thu., September 18, 12:03 PM
When I left Red Cross Blood Services fifteen years ago, I swore I would never do that work again. Yes, it paid me a salary. Yes, it was part time, so that I could be home when my kids got out of school. But it was – and continues to be – a thankless job that burns people out quickly. I lasted through four department directors, seven coordinators, and countless field reps. (Mostly, that tells you that I’m compulsive.)
Even off the job, someone would get to you. At a party one guy said to me, “Why bother? You know that in ten years someone will invent a substitute for blood and you won’t need to donate any more.” I wasn’t even trying to recruit him, but I said, “Sure, but what if you get in an accident tonight?”
I did continue to donate blood – except for the time when I was in a medical study. I was up to fifteen pints – would have made my second gallon – when a blood director decreed that my Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia made it too dangerous for me to donate blood. No use pointing out that I had had the condition for years and had donated without incident. One of the main criteria in the decision to accept a donor concerns whether s/he needs the blood more than the blood bank. But that guy was just covering his own back; some forms of HHT are more severe than that in our family.
I should point out that there are more than one type of blood bank. Here in Connecticut all donated blood is collected by the Red Cross, but in many other places, hospitals and community blood centers are approved by the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB). It’s a fact worth knowing if you don’t like the Red Cross. (That was another constant hurdle for us, the veterans of World War II who felt that they had not been well served by the Red Cross. It’s a long story.) My son, who works in Boston, donates regularly at Massachusetts General Hospital – and brings me all the promotional T-shirts they give him. He’s working on his fifth gallon.
I can’t explain how very proud I was of all the Americans in the Midwest who rolled up their sleeves on September 11, 2001. That blood would have been absolutely vital for all the burn victims, had they actually survived the crashes. Donating blood is such an American way to help. (In Europe, there exists a certain quid pro quo even for “volunteer” blood donors.)
You’ll notice that twenty years have passed since that guy at the party gave me an excuse not to donate blood, and synthetic blood still hasn’t been developed. There are medical situations where only real blood will do. And the supply is once again running low; promos are running on radio and television to go and give blood. And – even though I can’t do it myself – I must add my appeal.
You have to plan on giving up an hour of your time. You have to fit the age and weight criteria (over 17, more than 110 pounds) and be in reasonably good health. You have to undergo a brief medical history and have your temperature and blood pressure measured. You will be deferred if (1) the nurses feel you are not well enough to donate or (2) you have some condition (prior hepatitis, for example) that makes your blood unusable. If you feel that, for some reason your blood should not be used but you are embarrassed to say so, it is possible to mark your registration slip without anyone’s knowing. (Bar-coded labels are provided; you stick one of them on the paper.)
So the professional nurses check you out and put you on a table (or a lounge). A phlebotomist cleans your arm and inserts a needle. (A brand new sterile needle – you will not catch anything from the needle.) The pain is no worse than cutting yourself shaving. Women seem to stand it better; jocks are more likely to faint. A standard unit (about a pint) is measured by weight; you’re done when the scale goes down – give or take ten minutes.
You are checked several times to be sure you’re okay; you might be dizzy from getting up too fast, for example. Meanwhile, you can have something to drink and something to eat. (There’s always someone who complains about the food – it’s not gourmet or organic, y’know.) Coffee at Red Cross is a stereotype and a joke, but one of my volunteers taught me to make the best coffee.
You walk out of there with the feeling that you’ve done something good, which is not a bad feeling.
Remember how I was told that I can’t give blood any more because of my HHT? I received a letter in the mail yesterday from Red Cross Headquarters in Hartford, asking me to donate. Evidently they sent one to everyone who had ever donated, because M.D. got one too. They must be really hard up in Connecticut. I sent the darned thing back, with a notation that I was insulted and why I was. I never could teach them to use their database properly – and I was one of the first to make proper use of the database at all.
Your past follows you forever or, as I’ve said before, nothing you ever learn is wasted. There are times when I’d like to unlearn it, though.
