Blood Money

(I want to preface this by saying that I’m not complaining, looking for sympathy, or expecting to gross anybody out. I’m just really hard up for a new blog post and it’s been unusually long since I posted. So, in my desperate search for a new post, I present this anecdote, which culminates in musing…)


Monday I went to the plasma center to donate plasma. Well, “donate”… actually “sell.” Because you get twenty bucks for a “donation.” Anyway, I had never donated before, and I needed money, and I figured my body was a health factory, so why not get some grocery money while helping society to some tiny degree?

Plasma donation is not like giving blood. They take your blood, filter out the plasma and replace it with saline, and put the blood back in your body.

Or, at least, that’s the idea. I forgot that I have “small veins.” Basically, they were able to take the blood out of me but were unablt to put it back in. And they tore up three of four veins in the attempt, giving me three hematomas to care for.

A full donation is 825 mL, and they were only able to take just under 200 mL from me (and even that took forever, because of my small veins). If you lose over 200 mL, you are deferred for eight weeks as though you donated blood. I was just below the cutoff line, so I was scheduled to go back today and try again.

Since it was my first time, they gave me the whole payment, but next time I’d be docked according to volume. Makes sense. And they said if I still had bruised veins to not bother coming in. Well, I still have bruises so I am going to cancel and reschedule. Because let’s face it: the odds of them being able to magically take 825 mL from the only viable vein left when they only got 200 from three veins… well, the odds of that succeeding were approximately 3,720 to 1. And then I’d be booted for eight weeks. That’s why I’ll have to reschedule… or just give up the idea.

So there I was, missing almost a half pint of blood, being smothered by nervous techies with ice packs, force fed a ton of water and crackers, ruing that I’d most likely be spending that twenty on food to make up for it. I don’t mind needles at all, but the reason I never gave blood was because I couldn’t afford to be weak and lightheaded for a few days, since I was always so active in karate. Lately, I’ve been a sedentary little bitch, so I figured why not donate plasma? I’m not used to being tired and achy (and thirsty) like that… it’s weird. Not complaining, just saying it feels… weird. I mean, it was just a half pint of blood.

So that didn’t work. There is truly no such thing as “easy money.”

So now I have a question for myself: If I can’t assume I’ll be making any extra cash by donating plasma, can I in good conscience waste this money on something nice for myself? Or should I save it for the inevitable gasoline and grocery cost-of-living? It puts it in perspective when you have to go through all that just to get twenty bucks. It makes you think, “What is worth twenty dollars if this is what it takes to get twenty dollars?”

So there you have it. A worthwhile question that took way to long to arrive at. But I posted.