The Hose

Evil

SEASON OF GIVING

I met some friends for drinks last week and one of them told me a pretty interesting thing: when you donate blood, they can put that stuff on the shelf for up to 6 weeks, but platelets are only good for 5 days... so around the holidays, platelets are in seriously short supply everywhere because people rarely think about this stuff while in the midst of holiday shopping.

Since I live only a few blocks from Memorial Sloan Kettering (and seemingly, a dozen other hospitals as well), I dropped by to donate platelets after work on Dec 23rd. I've given blood before, but apparently, donating platelets is a whole other monster. I stepped into MSK feeling pretty jazzed about doing a good thing but things started heading downhill, and fast...

They made me sign all sorts of disclaimers. I easily waived my right to sue in the event of death (who ever heard of a dead man suing anyone?), but when I read the part about "the procedure may cause bruising..." I seriously thought about bailing. But I didn't. Toughness in action right there, boys.

Then came the medical history forms. Like I said, I've donated blood in the past, so I knew there would be a checkbox that asks "Since 1977, have you had sex with a man?" And this question always makes me chuckle: "Have you ever had sex with anyone with jaundice or anyone who appeared jaundiced." HAH. I don't know why that's funny, but it is. The thing I didn't expect is that in this hospital, you fill out some of the answers in a form, but for the morally-probing questions, they ask you face to face! So I sat in front of this lady as she ran me through a battery of moral challenges:

"Have you ever paid for sex?"
"Have you ever had sex with someone who has paid for sex?"
"Have you ever been paid for sex?"
"Have you ever punched someone in the stomach while soliciting sex?"
"Have you ever had unprotected sex with a drug user?"
"Have you ever punched someone in the stomach while buying drugs?"

There were others, but you get the point. At the end of it all --because apparently they get lots of liars-- the lady hands me two stickers with bar codes printed on them. She shows me that one sticker means "Use my blood" and the other one means "Throw away my blood." And then she turns away so I can choose the appropriate sticker to put on my answer sheet.

Isn't that somewhat extreme? Oh well, whatever.

Then comes the actual donating of platelets. Whereas donating blood is a 15 minute deal involving one needle, donating platelets is a 90 minute ordeal involving one needle in each arm. Basically, they take blood out of one arm, spin it around to extract the platelets, and feed the remaining blood back into the other arm. I say it's an ordeal not because one extra needle makes a huge difference, but have you ever had to sit perfectly still for 90 minutes? About 2 minutes into the procedure I was already in trouble. I had an itch above my right eyebrow. Fuck.

I moved my right arm to see if scratching would be feasible but I quickly realized that the needle was jabbing me in quite the wrong way when I bent my arm.

It's weird having an itch and not being able to scratch it because it doesn't go away. In fact, it jumped around my face and even multiplied so before long, I had itches on my chin, under my collar, on the tip of my nose, basically everywhere.

I'm still not entirely sure how I managed to get through the whole 90 minutes, but lemme tell you, the instant that the nurse pulled out the first needle from my elbow, I scratched my face so vigorously that I basically clawed my face into pieces. The nurse was horrified. It was almost worth the whole experience to see her face.

Luckily, the nurse quickly grabbed my arm because had broken any skin, I surely would have bled to death seeing as I had just donated all of my platelets. Hah. How ironic would that have been.

Anyway, that was that. I'm not sure this post had a point. But whatever...