When Things Go Well

"Enjoyed" an exceptionally good platelet donation today.

I was in and out in an hour with hardly a protest from the machine except for a couple of minutes when the tubes connecting my vein to it suddenly started vibrating randomly, a sensation I could feel all the way into my arm. The phlebotomist (not my regular who runs the office but someone who has been there and worked on me before) assured me it was not me but the machine at fault and jiggled the plumbing around until it stopped which made me a little nervous seeing as one end of said plumbing was stuck in my vein but she was careful and everything worked out in the end.

At the start of each donation they run a test tube of whole blood down to the lab and in about ten minutes they're back with a detailed breakdown the one part with which they are concerned being, obviously, the quantity of platelets per given volume of blood. They let me see the test results, too. I was surprised to see two categories marked "high" and we spent a few minutes trying to figure out what they were and whether they were important.

It turns out the lab can measure not just the number of platelets and red and white blood cells but also the size (width) of the red cells and a slightly elevated number of mine were outside the standard deviation which is an indicator for anemia a problem which I do not, and have never, had. The other out-of-range reading was for monocytes as a percentage of total white cells, but nobody had any idea what that indicated.

I took a T-shirt, in addition to the usual cookies, as my reward mostly because it was humorously illustrated with a cowardly Thanksgiving turkey running away from donating. I stay away from the serious, especially the patriotic, shirts because they're not only preachy and propagandistic but tend to be maudlin and sappy. My favorite is still the giant mosquitoes chasing after the mobile donation bus. I have two of those.

For some reason, they wrapped the donation site with a leopard print bandage which is neither inconspicuous nor retro enough to be cool and can not be passed off as camo, either. That's definitely coming off ASAP.