oceans deep

The adverts got to me with their ‘Do something amazing today – give blood and save a life’ message. But why do something amazing when alternatively you can do as I did yesterday and come as close as possible to giving blood without actually giving them a usable donation as you can (without discovering you have a blood-born virus)?

I’ve always meant to give blood but have never actually done anything about it. I came close when I was involved in the NUS (National Union of Students) campaign, ‘Please give blood because we can’t‘ but the urge passed when I remembered my fear of anything medical. Most of my friends are actually prohibited from giving blood, probably says a lot about my friends that once you exclude everyone who’s a gay man, or has recently had a tattoo or piercing, or has ever injected drugs, or has visited or lived in certain countries, or has received blood since 1980 that there aren’t many folk left standing. So I thought I should maybe give it a go. After checking my eligibility carefully given certain of my life-style factors.

After registering online with ScotBlood I made an appointment at my local centre and toddled off to attend last night. Now I wasn’t convinced that my iron levels would be up to it given that I’m a nut-wary vegetarian woman of childbearing age, but I sailed through the pin-prick test and found myself reclining on a large half-seat-half-bed contraption with a ‘donor carer’ pushing a really big needle into my arm. Everything was going grand, the sample bag, which collects the blood they use to test for syphilis, HIV, HTLV (which I’d never even heard of before) and hepatitis B and C, filled up nicely and blood started to flow into the main donation bag when it started to dry up… No amount of waggling my fingers could keep the flow of blood going and the donation had to be stopped. I still got some juice and a biscuit though! Which I consumed feeling like a fraud before I slunk out of the door. And that’s me for 12 weeks, then I can go and try again. Joy.