I Vant to Centrifuge Your Blood
We had a blood drive today at work, and as I had hoped they had some pretty rockin’ t-shirts for the citizen soldiers who showed up for the fun.
When they see my O-neg type come up on the screen, the blood nurses tend to get a vampiric glint in their eyes. I was encouraged to leverage my extra time on a quiet Thursday to give red blood cells, which involves taking what I assume is up to four times as much blood, separating the red blood cells out into two units rather than the normal one pint sack of standard blood, then re-injecting the plasma or whatever back into the vein so I don’t keel over.
Everything was going alright until the little light on the machine flipped over to “Replace” or whatever, at which point I got a burn in my arm around 2-3 on the owwie scale, and I noticed I had a bump developing around the needle that started to look a lot like a white-collar episode of Intervention.
The nurse observed high pressure on the machine’s display and asked me if it burned. I tough-guyed it, but I wasn’t going to lie. Pretty quickly the machine was turned off and the needle removed. I was informed that the bevel of the needle had rotated inside my arm, apparently injecting the plasma goop somewhat outside the vein, hence the crowning bump. I wanted to re-insert and continue, but they said I was done, at least consoling me that they got a pint of red blood cells out of the deal before we had to shut down.
I am still in the range of time I’m supposed to keep the bandage on. I’m kind of scared to take it off. I said, “That’s going to be a bruise.” She laughed and said, “I’m glad I caught it when I did, because it would have been pretty ugly if you had gone the next round.” Maybe I’ll get at least one domestic violence joke out of the deal.
They assured me that nothing in my physiology prevents me from doing this successfully next time. It was just operator error. I knew I was in for it when the tech couldn’t find my obviously bulging vein easily.
The nurse who caught the error was clearly disgusted with the needle job, but at least I got to refer her to our fertility clinic while she got me bandaged up.