A Plasma Donation Story
Like some of you fortunate few out there, I donated plasma for a small period of my life. It's an absolute bargain for students - just give away some of your body in exchange for money! And all you have to do for this money is stick a needle that's slighter larger than those used to donate blood for just an hour or so. It's quick! It's easy! It only hurts a wee bit! And as an added plus they (The Plasma People) don't tell you about, you'll often have cool stories that you can tell your grandchildren about 50 years from now.
Like this one time, after I had just given plasma, I heard their usual spiel which says something like "OK - now keep this bandaid on for 2 hours, make sure you don't lift any thing heavy with this arm..." I nodded my head vigorously at each one of these to show that I was paying attention, when really I was thinking to myself: "This nurse is really cute and attractive, maybe I should ask her out."
Pretty soon 2 hours are up, and some guys want to go swimming. I'm thinking: "Sure, it has to be OK now because they said I can take the bandaid off now." So we put on our swim trunks and head on over to the BYU swim pool to do some laps amongst other things. One guy goes off to the diving pool, while me and the other guy decide to race for a couple of laps. Down and back we went - quicker than molasses - then we popped back out of the lap pool and walked on over to the diving pool where we see our other friend getting out of the pool.
"What'd you do?" he says to us. "Oh, we just swam a quick lap back and forth."
"No - what did you DO?" and he points down at my arm.
I look down - and my right arm from the elbow down was just covered in blood. Completely covered from the elbow to the fingertips - and we look back and there's a trail of blood all the way back from one end of the pool to the other. The really weird part was that I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that my arm had been bleeding at all until he said something.
The life guards came over with towels and went around and cleaned up the blood and asked me all sorts of fun questions like "Did you get any blood in the pool?" and "because if you did we'll have to shut the BYU pool down" which isn't really a question, it's a statement but that's okay, I didn't feel like pointing this out to them at the time. Swimtime was over for the day. And now I have a nice story to tell the grandkids over dinner, about their sweet old grandpa doing silly things in college.
Like this one time, after I had just given plasma, I heard their usual spiel which says something like "OK - now keep this bandaid on for 2 hours, make sure you don't lift any thing heavy with this arm..." I nodded my head vigorously at each one of these to show that I was paying attention, when really I was thinking to myself: "This nurse is really cute and attractive, maybe I should ask her out."
Pretty soon 2 hours are up, and some guys want to go swimming. I'm thinking: "Sure, it has to be OK now because they said I can take the bandaid off now." So we put on our swim trunks and head on over to the BYU swim pool to do some laps amongst other things. One guy goes off to the diving pool, while me and the other guy decide to race for a couple of laps. Down and back we went - quicker than molasses - then we popped back out of the lap pool and walked on over to the diving pool where we see our other friend getting out of the pool.
"What'd you do?" he says to us. "Oh, we just swam a quick lap back and forth."
"No - what did you DO?" and he points down at my arm.
I look down - and my right arm from the elbow down was just covered in blood. Completely covered from the elbow to the fingertips - and we look back and there's a trail of blood all the way back from one end of the pool to the other. The really weird part was that I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that my arm had been bleeding at all until he said something.
The life guards came over with towels and went around and cleaned up the blood and asked me all sorts of fun questions like "Did you get any blood in the pool?" and "because if you did we'll have to shut the BYU pool down" which isn't really a question, it's a statement but that's okay, I didn't feel like pointing this out to them at the time. Swimtime was over for the day. And now I have a nice story to tell the grandkids over dinner, about their sweet old grandpa doing silly things in college.
posted by CT at 8:24 AM
4 Comments:
that's kind of like the time when i donated blood before a weight lifting final, and they said "don't lift anything heavy" and i scoffed at their so-called advice because i've never so much as comprehended fainting, so of course i could lift heavy things right after donating blood. so i rushed through the donation in the wilk, ran (and i really do mean ran. i was late for my final) over to the rb for my final (i only almost fainted once!), and then tried to take my weightlifting final, where i had to see how much i could lift in one shot on various machines. bad plan. bad bad plan. there's a reason why they don't tell you to lift anything heavy.
ps. hi marie!
I gave blood once. Then I went to play ultimate frisbee. It lasted almost three hours. I almost passed out twice. Glad I didn't.
I have always done physical stuff right after giving blood and never had a problem. Of course, I wouldn't want to do it right before a weight lifting final.
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