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2003-02-26 - 3:48 p.m.
I gave blood on Tuesday. The blood bank called me, because they were short. So instead of wondering whether they were tossing out my un-special "40% of everyone has your blood type" blood, I at least knew that my donation wouldn't go to waste.
BloodSource doesn't seem like the best name for a blood bank; it sounds more like the name of a Vampire Bar than a non-profit organization. They have a state-of-the-art building run by low-paid workers and/or volunteers. The operating model for BloodSource is that you are ferried to various "stations." The first station is a check-in desk in the lobby. After I checked in, the desk lady told me to wait in "the gazebo"--yes, they have an indoor gazebo! This is how the money is portioned out at non-profits: none to the workers, lots to the architects. To keep donors disoriented, it was impossible to see the gazebo from the check-in desk, because it was behind a giant brick wall. There are no "this way to the gazebo" signs. So I stood there stupidly, looking all around for anything that might resemble a gazebo, until the desk lady told me how to find it. After the gazebo comes the interrogation room, any one of a row of tiny glass-walled offices that open out onto the main floor where all the bloodletting stations are. There are people whose sole job is to ask the same fifty-odd extremely personal questions to each donor, all day long. Naturally they get pretty good at rapid-fire speaking. I got asked things faster than I could even listen to them. Because of the freaky nature of the questions, I asked if I could get a copy of the list, so I could comment on it with more accuracy. The answer was NO. They want to ensure that the list is not "leaked" to people with contaminated blood so they can use it to cheat at the exam! Now, that is the stupidest reasoning I heard all day, because even if you'd never seen the list before, if you wanted to "cheat on the blood test" (didn't that used to be the punch line of a Polish joke?) all you'd have to do is answer "no" to each question. What Evah. The staffer did, however, let me copy down my favorite question, "Have you ever had a dura matter (brain covering) graft?" She also kindly explained it to me: that's when they cut open the top of your head, and put a special protector over your exposed brain tissue. It's questions like this that remind me nothing really bad has ever happened to me. By the time I'd completed all the paperwork, I felt partly like I was applying for sainthood, and partly like I was undergoing an exit interview after escaping from The Island of Dr. Moreau. Next came the extraction area, the Killing Floor. This is where I noticed that the workers treat everyone's precious, precious, blood like it was hazardous waste, which is sort of a paradox, since after the workers avoid coming even in finger contact with blood, it later gets injected directly into someone's veins. It's kind of like the way you have to handle raw chicken, treating it as extremely dangerous toxic material, and then eating it. The only other guy donating blood was an aging hippie who wouldn't shut up, one of those now-rich hippies with a grey beard and chi pants. I would have thought more mean thoughts about him if he hadn't been, you know, donating blood. But it did strike me that I felt like I was being processed the way a criminal would be, as if the staff was highly suspicious of me and disliked me. Sometimes they'd ask "are you okay"--what is the proper response to that? "I'm watching blood flow out of my arm and through a crazy straw into a plastic bag--how 'okay' *should* I feel?" It's an extemely disorienting experience, at best. Despite the expensive decor of the place, every bag of blood rested on a low-tech kitchen scale while it was being filled up. The staff just waited for the bag to reach a certain weight, and then you were done. Actually not done, because then they took an extra vial of blood for testing purposes or something. And another. And another. And another! Yes, I got to think "now, at last, I am done" a whopping five times before I was really done. The last station is the snack area, definitely run by a volunteer. It's like a tiny cafe with no menu. Donors have to stay there at least ten minutes, and drink at least two cups of liquid. There's plenty of food, too. A volunteer gave me a styrofoam cup full of Sloppy Joe mix, explaining that today was Sloppy Joe day. Sloppy Joes answer the question, "what if ground beef was sweet?" I ate it just so the volunteer wouldn't feel bad. What h wanted to know was, if giving blood is such an ordeal for me, why do I do it? I don't know. It's not like I was using the blood. (No, wait, I was. Never mind.) I don't really add to the greater good of humanity, though: I don't do volunteer work, I don't adopt stray animals (though I do feed the squirrels in my back yard), I skipped all the recent anti-war demonstrations--really, what do I do besides take up space? Not much. Sometimes I carpool. This and regular voting seem like the least I can do.
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