i went to give blood today, after months of evading the Blood Mafia ( + ). i also agreed to do the double donation thing, partly because i’d put it off for so long.

in filling out the prescreening form i notice, over time they adjust for things that will be flags to Mad Cow, SARS and the like.

Question 28 was new to me and I thought interesting:

In the Past 12 months, have you been in juvenile detention, lockup, jail or prison for more than 72 hours?

Larry the blood guy was my attendant and they were supposed to take a pint, fill me w/ a pint of saline and take another pint. deep in the archives of this blog i’ve talked about each experience seeming to get worse. Larry would prod, mark, fidget, tape, untape, mark again, inspect. and then give a detailed play by play about how he was going to stick me. Damn, just stick me and let it be a surprise. the anticipation is worse than the sting. Finally he did it, and he just never seemed to be satisfied w/ his insertion. he would look at it, look at the machine that took in the blood, examine the readings that i was not in position to see. and it just took a long long time. specially with him flitting about. I know he’s not new because he was at the blood drive at my old job from about 3 years ago.

about 15 minutes in, he tried to move the needle. which i really was not pleased wihti looked at it once, they said it would be a smaller needle for this double donation. beneath the skin it looked like an electric cord buried under a thin rug.

after the first bag filled up it seemed like it took a 1/2 hour which was odd because i usually fill the bags up quickly.

he decided to call it quits after the 1st pint because the vein was collapsing.

and i’m sitting over on the side eating my complimantary donor snacks and this lady comes up to me and says, “so, you couldn’t produce? that’s okay, sometimes it happens to all of us”.

like I had erectile disfunction.