It only took four years

It has been a long time since I made a post about my Apheresis donations. Every two weeks I go to a Red Cross blood donation center and donate platelets. It is similar to giving blood, except they filter my blood. This way they only collect the platelets and let me keep everything else in my blood.

I reached a big donation number, so now is a good time for an update. Since the blog does not have too many pictures of me standing around holding stuff, here is me holding the plaque and pen they gave me.

This is a closer picture of the pen. It is engraved 200 Apheresis Donations and has my name.

While I reached 200 donation units in July, it took a while for them to get the pen engraved. Since I am blessed to have platelet rich blood, when I make one trip to the donor center the Red Cross can extract three units of platelets.

Normal whole blood collections usually need ten minutes or less after the needle is inserted. This process takes around 90 minutes. The good news is they have it setup so apheresis donors can watch a movie to pass the time. Back in the days of February 2011 when I published my last post, I had just watched The Town and received my plaque for 100 donations. Since then, I have made many trips and seen many movies as I donated. In the order I watched them, they are:

Salt; RED; Unthinkable; The Illusionist; Changing Lanes; Casablanca; Love and Other Drugs; The Incredibles; Get Him to the Greek; Rango; No Strings Attached; Unknown; Source Code; Bridesmaids; Limitless; Groundhog Day; The Ides of March; Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang; Friends with Benefits; Drive; Moneyball; The Descendants; J. Edgar; American Gangster; Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby; Somkin' Aces; The Punisher; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Today you Die; Man on a Ledge; The Expendables; Blunt, The Fourth Man; The Italian Job; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; and Lawless.

Sometimes donations do not go perfectly. Since I have been to the center 39 times in the last two years, small things are bound to happen. Once I got a hematoma and another time I got a bruise (which led to follow up phone calls asking if I was OK) from needles that did not stay in the veins.

I went in to donate on New Year's Eve. However, they could not accept me because my temperature was too high. It was 99.6 degrees and the maximum allowed is 99.5. I have been deferred for too high a hear rate, but never before for too high a temperature. Whatever the temperature's cause was, I was just fine. I did not feel sick nor did I develop a fever afterwards.

I bring all of this up because I want you to think about what you are doing to help the people around you. This is a project that works well for me; what are you doing to make the world a better place?