witness me, bloodbag!

[digitaldiscipline]

The hotel was lovely and super-close to the donation site - that's a keeper for anyone else they need to send that way.

The donation site was... more of a mixed bag.

I got there before any of the staff when I rolled up at 0815, because both the phlebotomists thought the donation was at 0900; the on-site coordinator arrived about 0820.

Things remained a little rocky with the facility staff once they arrived and got down to business.

Them: "We're ready."
Me: *picks up tote bag with snacks, Tums, laptop, and cell phone*
Them: "What do you think you're going to be able to do?"
Me: "... keep myself occupied?"
Them: "Oh, no, honey, you ain't going to be able to do nothin'."
Needles: *go in both elbows, rather than an elbow/back-of-forearm, to allow one hand any kind of freedom of movement*
Me: "Well, at least my girlfriend had the foresight to load movies* on her computer."

The apheresis equipment looks to be a half-step up from what they had at Shands, or maybe they just used a bigger-gauge needle, because it needed a lot less intra-donation hand-holding to make the centrifuge happy - or maybe the process is better able to extract the T cells from what they drew off and it doesn't need to be micromanaged as much anymore. In either case, the attending nurses paid a lot less attention to what was being drawn off than during either of my previous two donations. There were no other donation/recipient folks present until noon, and, while I try to be as low-maintenance as possible as a patient/guest, it was a notably less-welcoming environment than the previous ones had made me accustomed.

They also seemed to be a lot less actively involved with the process as a whole, especially towards the end, when all the saline replacement and calcium depletion had me feeling rather desperate to use the restroom, and they took an almost ostentatiously long time unhooking one, and then the second, needle. When my answers to "how are you feeling?" are increasingly pointed iterations of "I really need to use the bathroom," maybe... pick up the pace just a scosh? Nobody likes a bedpan, folks. I had a sense of urgency there that was, perversely, in inverse proportion to what it looked like the staffer was feeling - the more uncomfortable I got, the more slowly she appeared to go about her tasks.

Despite being hooked up to a calcium/saline** IV on the return line, I still got to "enjoy" the symptoms of calcium depletion at varying levels of acuteness throughout.

The blood return warmer on the rig I was wired into had two temperature settings: OFF and FRESH COFFEE. I opted for OFF. Which was funny, because everyone else was in long pants, scrubs, and fleece jackets, and i was in a T-shirt and shorts.

The staffers mentioned that they (OneBlood) have a facility in Orlando; if my donor recipient needs another refill, maybe that's an option. The combo platter of a pair of four-plus hour drives compounded by a lot less favorable bedside manner than the folks at Shands had me feeling pretty crispy, even though the donation itself went more quickly this time than either of the previous iterations (18,000 ml to be drawn and spun, rather than 23,000 or whatever it was the previous ones)

... and I totally forgot to pick up a well-wishes greeting card for the recipient.

* Captain America: The First Avenger (and CA: The Winter Soldier, but we only watched the first one at the facility; TWS was once we got home)
** I had to laugh that, the last time they checked my blood pressure before unhooking, it was elevated 30 extra points, and their concern was that I was *dehydrated* rather than, you know, tense from trying not to piss my fucking pants and at a five or six in terms of discomfort due to calcium depletion. I pointed out that the more saline they wanted to push, the more I had to pee, which had approximately no effect on their attitude whatsoever. I weighed EIGHT POUNDS more when I got home yesterday than I did when I left the house Monday morning - snacking on some homemade beef jerky and drinking two 16oz bottles of water ain't gonna do that, folks. How about you just turn off the fucking spigot and let me take a much-needed leak.

Comments

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is not a good way to get repeat donors...

[etcet.livejournal.com]

which is why this was also sent to my donation coordinator, albeit without the festive footnotes.

[jola.livejournal.com]

yeah but on a scale of one to infinity how much did you love Winter Soldier?? was this your first time seeing it? Do we need to talk about it??

Sorry, the fangirling is strong.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

uh, four or five out of ten? i mean, comic book/superhero movies aren't really my jam - the last one i was actively interested in seeing before Deadpool came out was Watchmen, if that tells you anything. i'm not really the target audience.

TWS was a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours to unwind yesterday evening, but it's not the kind of thing i'd actively search out or pay money for.

(caveat: i give precisely zero fucks about the mcu, no matter how much i might enjoy rdj, evans, hiddles, ruffalo, scarjo, and slmf'ingj as human beings and actors. i caught part of one of the thor movies on cable a year ago and thought it was so dumb, i turned it off after maybe ten minutes.)

it was my first time seeing both CA flicks, but, honestly, as a citizen of tumblr, there was literally nothing but the big-explosion fight scenes that i haven't already seen in gifsets and meta a hojillion times.

which, yeah, means i had no feels whatsoever when bucky fell off the train in the first filck, even without knowing he'd be back - i didn't see the resonance and depth of their friendship that the shippers make freight with. even with that, the movie as a whole had all the dramatic tension of an episode of wheel of fortune, and, unsurprisingly, hayley atwell as peggy carter was the best thing about it.

they were fine popcorn flicks (folks say TWS is basically a bond/bourne movie, and that's not too far off - but there's a reason i haven't watched any of those since... casino royale, maybe? until the new mad max came out, the last time i went to a movie in a theater was 2009).

but, having watched deadpool over the weekend, there was no way they were going to come close to clearing the bar for me, because they're just not the right fit for what i am looking for, movie-wise. (for instance, by the end of the first one, i was disconnected enough from the narrative to wonder why the shit they'd filmed SLJ's interaction with Cap on a green screen instead of actually in times square, and then realized it was probably due to conflicts of promotional/advertising interest... but i was looking at the screen closely enough to notice something like that, and not really invested or interested in what the characters were saying, because damn near everything in terms of dialogue seemed laid on thick, in triplicate, so it was easy to ignore or just half-listen to.)

[jola.livejournal.com]

ok, i can absolutely see why it's not your cup of tea ... and i'm pretty sure i'm 100% the target audience for this. I wasn't that into the Bucky end of the storyline when i saw CA:FA and that whole dynamic didn't grab me until CA;WS. I actually didn't initially want to see the first Cap movie because i was familiar with the character via the 80's era comics and I never really LIKED the character much until Evens brought a surprising humanity and depth to it.

Still it feels like discussing the relative merits of a specific peach pie with someone who doesn't much like peaches ... there really isn't much to say when you just didn't find it terribly engaging (I had this conversation with K after seeing GoTG which he did not particularly care for) but i appreciate your comments!

[etcet.livejournal.com]

aye. comic books were never my thing - i've only read the frank miller batman, watchmen, v for vendetta, and a couple bits of transmetropolitan and the tick. the sprawling, splitting narratives, reboots, etc - i lack the intertextual understanding to grok most of the freight that isn't on-screen, and am not invested in the story deeply enough to do more than suface-level appreciate the analysis of others (like how hints were dropped in the hospital room where cap reawakened to let him clue in that time had passed, and how that was a great attention to detail by shield (and the costuming & makeup departments who did the nurse's look)

[jola.livejournal.com]

I think that's a part of what i get from baseball that other people don't get from baseball too - when I see a Red Sox/Yankees game or a Cubs/Mets game i know the history so there is decades of subtext there for me to enjoy where someone that isn't into just sees a slow game of pitch/catch/bat/catch. The enjoyment of baseball is like 65% stats and history*.

Having read the comics adds a great deal of texture ... it'll be interesting to see if i like Suicide Squad since i don't know any of that story and don't really know any of those characters other than what i've seen others post about, it could be that without all that background i'll have the same "meh" reaction that you did to the Cap movies.

*totally arbitrary percentage, more than 50% and less than 80% for me

[etcet.livejournal.com]

i concur - you could, if you wanted, make the contextual argument for a given pitch if you wanted to get fractally detailed about it (this is true for most sports; some just have more depth than others)

... which isn't to say that i will gleefully describe baseball as "two guys playing catch, and one guy being a dick about it." :-D

[anarcha.livejournal.com]

That's ridiculous. Especially when you're giving what you're giving.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

that was my thought as well. my biggest concern is that, if they didn't calibrate and attend to the centrifuge, the recipient won't get the right amount of refill material out of it, which is the entire point of doing the donation.