A Matter Of Some Gravity

I remember the first time I gave blood. I was a teenager, and a little nervous. "I've never done this before," I confided to the needle man. "Cool! I've never done this before, either!" he said, which would have been hilarious if he'd said it to my roommate.

I've been giving A+ blood for forty years since. You get used to the routine, although it does change. The questionnaire got a lot longer in the eighties.

Have you personally eaten brains with a spoon right out of a standing cow?
Did the cow look edgy?
Have you spent time adding up to five months or more, excluding Ramadan, in any of the following 413 countries, colonies, protectorates, and sketchy neighborhoods (see chart)?
Have you ever had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or any other immediately fatal ailment?
Have you had sex, even once, involving any of the major three orifices (see chart)?
Have you ever been paid for sex involving any of the major three orifices (see chart)?
How much?
Have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has had sex, even once, with anyone who had purple spots?
Really? How cool is that?
In the last twelve months, have you spent more than 72 hours in lockup?
While there, were you admired in any way?
Have you ever taken sipsies, even once, from the martini glass of anyone exhibiting symptoms of any of your more fatal ailments?
Have you ever taken sipsies, even once, from the martini glass of anyone who has taken sipsies, even once, from the martini glass of Charlie Sheen?
Are you feeling well today?
Or do you feel a touch of meningitis coming on?

The donation itself is not noteworthy. It's never given me a spot of trouble. I'm packed off to the cookie room with a set of instructions that has not varied in forty years. "Drink plenty of fluids. Do not take your bandage off or shower for three hours. Moderate exercise only, and no heavy lifting for 24 hours." I'd leave the donation center, peel off my bandage, bicycle home, lift my bike up the stairs, and hit the shower before popping the first of a series of beers, which, if you press them about it, are not the fluids they had in mind. Since nothing untoward has ever happened to me, I haven't changed my protocol.

What they should have said is: "Drink plenty of non-alcoholic fluids and don't take a hot shower because even though everything will be just fine for the first forty years, there's no telling what will happen after that." That would have been more accurate. Last week Dave and I came back from our standard blood donation. A purveyor of particularly fine brew near the Red Cross sells cheap pints on Tuesdays, and we always schedule for Tuesdays so we can get an immediate fluid replacement pint. Then we walked home and Dave made dinner. I might have had a nice Muscat to go with. Then I went to take a shower. We're five hours into this thing by now, and everything was going well until I decided to hot up the water, and I remember having the thought that I should turn the water off because something was wrong, and the next thing I knew I was staring up at the glass shower doors from a crumpled position at the bottom and swimming in place trying to get myself upright. I stumbled to the towel and things were still wrong and I thought I should probably go to bed before I fell over again, which would have been a good idea, but instead I found myself on my hands and knees next to the bed, and I finally climbed in. While there I tried to review ordinary items of information to see if they were still there, and some of them weren't. It wasn't until morning that I recognized that the hands-and-knees part had apparently been preceded by a second crash, as evidenced by the noggin-sized hole in the wall and a pretty good headache.

I don't think I'm going to give blood anymore. It's either that or quit drinking, so it's that. I realize this is a little selfish of me, so I'll just say that I'm still on the blood marrow donation program, in case anyone needs any. Act now, because according to the Red Cross my stuff is going to go bad in another two years.

Blood, Simple

Since we've retired, we've looked for excuses to take walks. For instance, if I suddenly need a little plastic mountain goat, and never mind why, then off we go six miles into downtown and come back with one. So when I made an appointment to give blood at Red Cross (2.6 miles), I invited Dave along. He hesitated. "You're supposed to drink extra fluids afterwards," I wheedled. "There's a brewpub a few blocks from the Red Cross that pours $2.50 pints on Tuesdays." Sold!

I've been giving blood for almost forty years, so I have an impressive tally of pints shed. The people at the blood donor center invariably express their gratitude and make it seem as though I've done a really stellar thing. I haven't. If someone, right now, told you she'd do something to you that stung for a nanosecond in exchange for a nap on a lounge chair and a faceful of donuts, would you go for it? Me too.

But Dave has always refused to go. Needles give him the willies. "If they can take it with a knife, I'm game," he always says. He doesn't have many vulnerabilities, but if you Tivo the scene in that movie when Nick Nolte is getting a huge needle in the knee, you can get a whole lot of mileage out of it.

Dave says he did try to give blood once as a teenager but it was a dreadful experience, right up to the point where everything went black. He has a long way to fall, and witnesses reported the moaning sound triggered the Doppler effect. For a few days they just swept around him. Empires rose and fell.

But the man do love to walk. We took off for the Red Cross. I reassured him that they never miss my vein, even though it's small and invisible, whereas his veins jut and jump like cobras. Still, I looked around for one of the exceptional blood-drawers for him. You want a phlebotomist who shows a lot of confidence. Unfortunately, that doesn't weed out the sadists. Dave drew the fellow with the wild grey mullet and the Jack Nicholson leer, and that fellow had at him for several minutes, reducing his left arm to pulp, until the trainer stepped up and offered to take a stab at it.

The trainer, opting for the next arm over, went for a quick and graceful poke, then another, then another ten or twelve, and finally, through sheer force of will, he drilled in and mined some sort of deep aquifer and the well sprang forth. Dave's expression was rigid and staring. A young man nearby fainted dead away.

Nevertheless, eight weeks later, Dave again accompanied me to the Red Cross, theorizing it couldn't be worse, and it wasn't. It was exactly the same. Bruises in both arms bloomed like oil slicks on the sea, and days later folks were still edging away from him in the grocery line. I wouldn't have blamed him for calling it quits. But last week he accompanied me yet again. This time he had gone for the Needlephobe's Perfecta. He had spent that very morning at Kaiser getting a cortisone shot in his frozen shoulder. Was it a huge needle? I queried, as we walked to the blood donor center. Dave shuddered. "The guy who pushed the plunger in was in the next room," he said. At the center, we got ourselves settled into the lounge chairs. Dave was approached by a pony-tailed young woman who might have passed for thirteen. She sized him up, flicked her needle and slid it home, and Dave's blood leapt up and shot out into the bag in four and a half minutes.

Meanwhile, my blood was drooling out, spiraling down the tube with all the gusto of a seven-year-old on his way to bed. A team of phlebotomists stood around with frowns and thumped my arm and jiggled my needle and made fretting noises. Fifteen minutes later, my life force was still dribbling into the bag in a manner usually described as "ebbing away."

Both Dave and I have fine blood--A+, in fact, although Dave points out, that according to the DMV, I got an F in sex--and I hope our respective pints will have some salutary effect on somebody, somewhere. Although whoever gets mine might have to be patient.