Wednesday, April 08, 2009

pic of the day - blood


A friend of mine is encouraging me to consider becoming a bood donor. He invited me to come with him tonight when he gave blood. It's undeniably a good thing to do, and my mother and both her parents gave blood for as long as they were allowed to. But, I don't do well with needles and I mean, look at that one - it's like a flipping yoghurt straw!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I'm sure you've heard this from elsewhere but you do get a lot of support if you don't like needles. I'm not going to pretend its comfortable - its not - the worst bit is the needle going in and out but that's about 1-2 seconds max.

Due to moving around with jobs, I've ended up in mobile vans in all kinds of places. You do end up having all kinds of conversations - way back when I worked in HR, I ended up at the same time with 3 or 4 other HR people - none of us knew each other before - totally different companies / fields but we had quite an interesting chat !

At the moment my regular one is outside a hospital but there's a kind of nice view, their chosen radio station blasts out 80s tracks and the best bit by far - is revisiting the biscuits of my English childhood immediately afterwards - I'm not a great biscuit fan but where else would I choose to eat chocolate penguins ;)

The upsycho said...

@Nicola I stayed with my friend through the whole thing yesterday. That's his arm you see there. I saw how they check up on the donors all the time, and give them a drink and biscuits afterwards. There was a woman making sure everyone was alright before they left. I was in no doubt about any of that. But I don't seem to lose the sensation of that needle in me once it's gone in. For me it hurts all the time, and that's the bit I don't like!

This one was in our church, with the beds in a circle. The only person who got to do any chatting was Mark, because I was sitting next to him. Mind you, since he had me for company he was doing more listening than chatting ;o)

Penguins? Good grief. Those are what I buy for my kids when I don't want to be tempted to eat their snacks!

Anonymous said...

Actually they have jammie dodgers too and ones like these at my current place and some round ones wrapped in green foil but I can't remember what they are called.

Can't think of anything else re the needles, I guess they will come up with a painless way eventually.