A blood donor’s adventure

There’s a code on my blood donor profile that indicates that I can donate to babies. I apparently don’t carry a type of virus that means I can donate to wee ones – I wasn’t aware that blood requirements could be so specific beyond blood type. That’s another reason there needs to be more donors!

That’s the awesome news about yesterday’s blood donor adventure; the bad news is that I was unable to donate.

For those who have never donated blood let me explain the first part of the process:

1. You show up, they ask you to confirm your identity
2. they prick your finger to check your iron levels
3. they give you a pamphlet to read
4. you go into a little privacy booth to answer some basic questions
5. you eat cookies (plural!) while you wait to get called by a nurse
6. you get called by the nurse
7. the nurse takes your temperature and blood pressure
8. the nurse asks you “high risk” questions.

It all went wrong (or right, depending on your perspective) for me at step 7.

For starters, my temperature was “too high” (what they consider “too high” is 37.9C – which really isn’t that high given that the average is 37.2!) but what was more concerning was my blood pressure. The nurse said that we would continue to step 8 and repeat step 7 to see if the numbers were better.

They were not.

The nurse indicated that my numbers were still too high to safely proceed with the donation. She gave me a letter with both blood pressure readings and strongly suggested that I make an appointment with my doctor to have myself checked out.

I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to make a donation: what would have been my 16th. On Monday, I will call my doctor to figure out what’s going on so that hopefully, I can continue donating blood and saving lives! (including those of babies!)

If you’re a regular donor – please book your next appointment. If you’re not a donor – you should look for a clinic and go donate in my place. You’ll be helping a lot of people and you get free cookies!

Give Blood

The whole process of one person donating takes about an hour and a half from start to finish; It’s not a big commitment: It’s something like 2 hours every 3 months which works out to only about a half day per year. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend a half day of my year saving lives than doing something annoying like cleaning my kitchen!

Approximately every minute of every day, someone in Canada needs blood. In fact, according to a recent poll, 52 per cent of Canadians say they, or a family member, have needed blood or blood products for surgery or for medical treatment.

That’s a big blood requirement! I can’t remember if there was a specific motivating factor that convinced me to finally start donating but because I couldn’t think of a good reason not to donate I had added “give blood” to my life list.

Reasons to donate:

• Save Lives! (that makes you a REAL superhero!)
• Free Cookies! (all the oreo cookies you can eat! before AND after!)
• Free Soup! (if you like that sort of thing)
• Free Cupcakes! (occasionally)
• Nice People! (the nurses are super nice and friendly and so are the other donors!)

I’m hoping to get to at least 100 donations in my lifetime. My first donation was on June 29th, 2007.

My blood donation milestones
01 donation – Jun-29-2007
05 donations – Jul-16-2009
10 donations – Dec-30-2011
15 donations – Oct-06-2012
20 donations – Coming Soon
30 donations –
40 donations –
50 donations –