ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

For weeks now, my workplace has had posters up encouraging all employees to sign up for the September blood drive.  They are optimistic ads, more or less promising that no matter how much you drink and drive or how many children you have molested, if you simply consent to let the local blood bank extract some of your sweet life essence, all sins will be forgiven and you will be able to consider yourself a truly good human being.

But since I am only a mostly good person, I planned to blow off the blood drive and my excuse would be that we are closing the books for August and there simply wouldn’t be time for a blood donation while that was going on.

Then today was the blood drive.  And I still felt okay with my decision to skip out on the blood drive.  But then someone from the blood bank people sent out a plaintive e-mail imploring someone, anyone, to come give blood because for godsake it is just down the hall, you lazy fucks.  It explained that Kansas City is experiencing, lord no, a blood shortage and that we are down to a one day supply.  How this was calculated I have no idea, since how many people’s one day worth of blood is that counting?  Is that 25% of us?  10%?  Or is it some kind of average?

The e-mail also gave examples of the typical use of blood in emergency and surgery situations, citing a transplant patient who required 41 units of blood, a heart surgery patient who required 32 units, and a person who suffered a sudden aneurism and needed 16 units.  It also didn’t describe a unit.  Is a unit a pint?  If so, that is a lot of damn blood and I can’t imagine how much they must have lost, since frankly it sounds like these people were being stuffed with blood until it ran out their orifices.  But none of that mattered.  I guiltily realized that if I didn’t donate blood then I was basically conspiring to murder anybody in Kansas City with the bad taste to come down with a brain aneurism. And I didn’t really have a good reason not to, other than not feeling like it.  I was already more than ahead of schedule with the August close.

So I went down and asked my boss if she was going to give blood.  “I just did,” she said.  Apparently she hadn’t planned on it either, but the e-mail affected her the same as it did me.  Still, I felt a little better knowing that she didn’t feel like it either.

The people at the blood drive, after making sure that I don’t have AIDS or herpes or hepatitis, they made me eat a 250 calorie package of Nutter Butter cookies before letting me donate.  I received three compliments on the prominent veins in my left arm.  And my blood pressure was 98/80.  I suspect it was because of how cold our building is, since my temperature was only 97 degrees.  My pulse was 66, and my iron was 12.9, whatever that means.  I hadn’t donated in a long time, but this lady knew what she was doing way more than the last people who took my blood.  It felt weird having this little tube of warm blood leaning against my arm, watching my blood collect in a little plastic bag.  The technician let some of my blood go into a very tiny bag that looked like it held about an ounce or maybe two, and then the rest of it went into what I assume was a pint-sized bag (”it comes in pints?!”).  I mention this because I wondered if one of those was a unit or if they simply collect it in pints and then it gets divied up later after all the testing and processing and centrifuging and stuff that they do.

After I finished giving blood, the lady insisted that I had to eat more fucking cookies.  I really just wanted to get my lunch from the breakroom and eat that instead, but I was told that it was important to sugar back into my bloodstream.  “But the cookies from before were already more sugar than I usually have in a whole day,” I protested.  Unacceptable. It had to be sugar, she explained after I said I’d rather just have some water.  Then she offered me a variety of beverages, including Diet Pepsi.  Which…does not have sugar, but I was too tired from my recent blood-letting to argue about it.

The lady watched while I halfheartedly ate two Oreos and drank a little cup of RC Cola.  Speaking of which, when I got home and related this story to my husband, I was surprised to learn that Royal Crown Cola apparently has a knock-off of it (you know, like Dr Pepper has Dr. Thunder in the Wal-Mart brand).  Apparently it’s called GT Cola or something.  I thought that was funny, since these days RC basically IS the knock-off brand.  I mean, it’s always been cheaper than Coca Cola and Pepsi, but it used to be more of a contender.

After eating all the cookies I was finally free to go.  I felt quite woozy, so I went back to my desk and did a face plant for a little bit.  For the rest of the day, whenever I stood up, I felt light-headed and a little wonky from the whole thing.  I really wasn’t hungry for my lunch, but a couple of hours later I decided the sugar had basically done me no good, so I went and heated up the mashed potatoes and chicken I’d brought.  It made me feel a lot better.

However, I did receive for my troubles a red sticker shaped like a heart that said, “Be nice to me: I gave blood today”.  I wore it all day, hoping that the mild feeling of moral superiority it gave me was enough to make the physical symptoms seem unimportant.