A pint low!

Today not only marks Spirit Day and the fight to end bullying, but my first foray into donating blood. Normally, this wouldn’t be blog worthy, but as I do with most normal things, I turned this into the Thursday fiasco. I apologize for any misspellings and missing words…I’m still feeling a bit woozy.

I coerced the girl that works for me into joining me…we’re still not back on speaking terms. I started off by pulling the poor young man that was checking us in into a five minute conversation around our perfect stripper names. Mine is Citron or Juicy or something like that, Susan’s is Angel Bayard and Brad, God love him, chose Candy. I think that is a whole other blog.

Next, I tortured the poor women testing my hemoglobin to make sure my blood was healthy enough to donate. I told her I was a good bleeder, as my many attempts at free running produced better than average results.

Finally, I made it to the chair, well, the first one anyway. I told him it was my first time, so go easy. He told me it was his fourth time and they stopped and picked him up under the freeway on the way there. Funny guy! He wrapped my arm and checked for a good vein. Fail. I swapped chairs and gave the left arm a try. Also a fail. So he tried a blood pressure cuff to amp up the pressure. Finally, he called his supervisor over and said he didn’t like it, didn’t like the way my veins ran. How they ran? What possible way could they run besides straight down my arm? I told him to just go ahead and say it, I’m weird. Then I cracked a stripper joke to ease the tension. Something about veins shifting from using my arms to hang upside down so much.

They finally got me flowing and all was well. I was ten minutes behind Angel and I was intent on showing them just how good a bleeder I am. Three minutes later, my bag was halfway full.  Another hree minutes and I was done. They got me bagged and tagged and then the nausea set it. Apparently, they are super worried about first-timers. They gave me my token 8 oz lemon-lime soda, a red plastic bag, and told me there would be an incident report. Of course there will be. Why not!

When I finally felt better, they led me out of the chair and told me to tend to “my friend”. Apparently, despite many trips to the blood bank, she fainted, fell out of the chair and was now lying on the floor, yellower than the purse I was carrying. I sat down, offered encouraging feel-better comments like “You’re so yellow” and “I guess you won’t be working tonight”.

I found out that in addition to an incident report, they really don’t like to leave you alone. When the next wave of nausea came, I tried to sneak away to the bathroom, which was somewhat akin to trying to break out of prison. I was escorted to the bathroom, with apologies for invading my privacy, but “we just can’t have you passed out on the cold floor by yourself.” Finally, I felt almost whole and Angel was at least off the floor. We walked out with a shred of dignity, a bag of fruit snacks and a pretty darn good excuse not to work out.

We figured out all the wrong things to do, but as I looked at that pint of blood and heard that I may have just saved three lives, I felt pretty darn proud of us, fainting and all! And somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, I think I remember listening to Fat Bottom Girls and telling them I felt fine because I was listening to big fat fatties. My apologies to Queen.