Blood Clinic Shenanigans.

If you've never filled out a Red Cross questionnaire, I'm about to kind of explain some of the stuff on there. I imagine it's quite the same for any place you're donating your bodily fluids, to be honest, unless they have a different testing regiment or something. Regardless, I'll give you the run-down:

1. If you have spent more than two days or so in Jail, don't donate.
   (We don't know if you'd gotten raped, homes. We also don't know if the later-mention narcotics, or lying for that matter, landed you in there.)
   
   
2. If you have spent time adding up to four years in a foreign country from the year nineteen-blah to nineteen ninety-blah, do not donate.
   (Mad Cow Disease was some crazy bidness and we don't want no cow-insulin tainted gaijin tappin' his veins for us.)
   
   
3. If you have had any naked contact with someone of the same gender, do not donate.
   (Everyone has AIDS! My grandma and my dog, Ol' Blue! The Pope has got it, and so do you-!)
   
   
4. If you abuse drugs or narcotics, do not donate.
   (The advent of the plastic syringe, being the disposable unsterilizable syringe, has made heroin and third-world vaccinations a whole lot more dangerous.)
   
   
5. Don't donate if you've needed blood, platelets, dura-mater, an organ, or any other transplant or transfusion.
   (This ain't JC Penney's. No returns allowed. Plus, you could be having some terrible delayed reaction to them we've not seen due to a latency period or something.)
   
   

The deal-breaker for me, in the future and due to their very bleak outlook on the transgender community and their unwillingness to stray from the idea that anyone who has had contact with someone of the same - or once the same - gender is hopelessly contaminated with HIV, was number three. The attendee I had recently asserted that there are testing advents that will someday change that, but they're still in the works. I'll tell you more about her because she was interesting, but in the meantime, blood.

I realized that if I were going to donate, I'd have to do it celibate so I've been doing it since my sophomore year of High School. Realizing that I lived within walking-distance of a Community Blood Center in Missouri, I began donating frequently and graduated as a Gallon Donor for whole-blood.

Then, they began asking me about Platelets. I was actually quite spooked but I gave it a shot. It went terribly because the Community Blood Center is very fond of a single-vein TRICA Machine, which essentially uses one vein for returns as well as draws. It's quite slow, has a jarring sensation as your blood's pumped back into you, and worse, on my first donation, I had the joy of this sullen woman who wanted absolutely nothing to do with me or my puns, and she actually disregarded me while the needle pierced the vessel. It was horribly painful and I had a discolored needle-stuck arm that left me reminiscent of a junkie for two weeks or so.

Before leaving Missouri, I was three donations or so away from having donated a gallon of platelets as well. I'm two-down and one donation away from reaching one-gallon on platelets.

Having already registered to donate marrow, I'm moving down the list pretty fast and it's exciting.

Donating was pretty odd here. I tried to donate a ways back but they didn't have any openings for platelets and I wound up having to donate Whole Blood again. When I did donate, they stuck an underlying nerve by picking a vein I'd asked them not to use, and it took a long while to heal.

I was a little nervous about going in this time, because I imagined getting that whole Junkie-Limb Procedure again. Instead, this aging Islamic convert shows up with her beautiful hijab pinned with one of those tiny gold fibulas, and tucked neatly into her labcoat, gives me the All Clear and tries (successfully) two new and completely asymmetrical veins to donate Platelets with something other than the TRICA Machine I was used to.

She was very kind, as well. And she liked my jokes. Trying a vein in my wrist for returns and using the typical elbow-joint vein for withdraws, she puts the wrist one in and asks, "Does that feel okay?"

Being a charming smartass, I replied, "It feels great. I'd actually like you to do it to my other arm, too!"
Giggle-snorts from the entire facility went off and she laughed, obliging.

I think, when I go in for my final Platelet donation, I'll get a nice photo of her and her name so that I can show her off. She's quite possibly the nicest person I know, and I admired her for being so open with developments in the phlebotomy community's technology and the plight of the transgendered donor. Or even my situation: I'm in love, but I'd better not let it get too far ahead of itself if I want to help anyone.

I don't know. It was just really cool, and I feel sort of progressed. Onto marrow and maybe sperm, if that's not totally weird.