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Friday, June 29, 2007
Snapshots from Home Further Bloodletting I'm not sure how descriptions of my regular donations at the National Institutes of Health's blood bank became a series on University Diaries, but okay. And I mean regular. I looked at my printout while I was waiting to give. I'm what they call a "galloner." It all starts with a phone call from a woman named Sparkle (her real name). She reminds UD that her O positive, CMV negative blood is all the rage, so would UD please come over and give them some. Today, as it happens, UD is having lunch with her friend Karyna in 'thesda, and Karyna's happy to drop her at the big barred security gates of NIH after their meal at Cafe Deluxe. UD has a salade nicoise . Naively, UD begins walking toward the NIH campus at the entrance where Karyna drops her off. An anxious security guard immediately accosts her, and directs her to wait for a perimeter shuttle down the block. This shows up in seconds. There's no one on it but UD and the driver, and they have a wide-ranging chat about his love of gambling in Atlantic City; his tall dark and handsome son who's having trouble fighting off women; his inability to give blood because of his diabetes; UD's love of the sun and how if she had it to do all over again she'd be an undergrad at the University of Hawaii; UD's preference for places like Rehoboth over Atlantic City; and how it doesn't matter if you can't give blood, because there are lots of other good things you can do. She's in the Clinical Center now, a gargantuan building in which UD must walk down corridor after corridor to get to the blood bank. They're having computer trouble today. UD is asked to sit tight in the little examination cubicle where they check her iron content and pulse and blood pressure to make sure she's able to give. Idly, UD wanders to the computer in the corner of the room and does some GMAIL chatting with a friend of hers who works at US News. "Hope you don't mind my commandeering your computer," UD says to the nurse who eventually arrives. "Actually, I do. That's government property." UD stops what's she doing immediately, of course. But UD, daughter of a long-serving NIH scientist, is so not impressed by this. Her father, and everyone else, was always bringing home government property... Of course, it was mainly those ugly black pens... No computers in those days... UD aces her pre-donation tests and walks into an adjacent room to lie down and have the stuff out. As always, before she lies down, UD grabs the stupidest-looking magazine she can find. With her right arm (the veins are better in her left), she holds this aloft and reads it intently -- all in order not to look at the nurse sticking a needle in her arm, and then not to look at her blood in the tube. She finds that things go more smoothly - in this as in so many aspects of her life - when she's in denial. At some point another nurse, with a notepad, comes over to interview UD as part of an experiment about iron content in which UD's been entered as a "control." (That is, UD's part of the group that has no trouble with iron content.) Then it's just a matter of squeezing the little ball they give you to get the blood out faster... doesn't take long at all... And now the nurse is wrapping a bright pink bandage with happy faces on it (would it be rude or snobby to ask for another...? oh, forget it...) around her left arm, and UD's free to go. |