Blood Donation

It’s the holiday season again, and our friends over at the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center are once again requesting for people to give blood. For a long time I gave blood, until the process got to be too much of a pain in the ass. The list of exclusions keeps getting longer, and I got really tired of being rejected because some idiot phlebotomist wouldn’t listen to me.

In 1991, I received a blood transfusion while out of the country. Specifically, I received blood while in Saudi Arabia. This is a lifetime disqualification, except for one minor detail. I received the blood transfusions from 5th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and 251st Evac Hospital. This means I am not disqualified, since the blood transfusion was performed by the US military. I got really tired of explaining this to people doing the paperwork and then getting them to explain the facts to the physician. If the idiot reviewing the paperwork does not explain it correctly, I end up wasting my time because the physician DQ’s me. It got to the point where I had about a 50-50 chance of the morons from M.D. Anderson getting it right. So I gave up. It became more of a pain in the ass for me to donate blood than it was worth to me.

Here’s a handy tip: if you are asking people to provide you a valuable commodity for nothing out of the goodness of their hearts, don’t make the process intrusive, complicated and bothersome. It makes a certain portion of the population kind of grumpy, and less inclined to donate.