So yesterday I gave blood for the first time since I went to Scotland. Because I'd been in Scotland for 6 months, I was barred from giving blood until recently when they relaxed the restrictions. You see, as far as I know, scientists have yet to discover a way to screen blood for the presence of mad cow disease. Therefore, anyone who'd been in the UK for over 6 months in the last 20 or so years was considered possibly tainted. They changed this last year to anyone there for a certain amount of time before 1996, and since I was there in 2002-03, I'm free to bleed for the Red Cross once again.

So when the building across the street from us announced that they were having a blood drive and that our company was invited to donate, I signed up. I kinda like giving blood it makes me feel like I'm doing something nice for others and of course, it gives me a certain feeling of pride when I see the blood letters reaction to my gigantic veins. That's right, I have huge veins. Just ask Jamie, a friend of mine who is at the moment a traveling nurse in Cali. She's mentioned several times how easy it would be to stick a needle in my prominent blood vessels, often while in a public place, making other people in the room either laugh or appear very nervous.

Anyway, so I arrive at the conference room and they begin to ask me all sorts of questions like, "Have you traveled in a malarial area in the last year?", "Have you taken drugs by needle not prescribed by a doctor?", "Have you ever had sex with a man who has had sexual relations with another man?" and so on... In both the survey/snack room and the blood room they were showing on large projector screens a video from BBC and the Discovery Channel about life in the sea. There were pretty pictures of parrot fish and sea turtles. I had a lovely conversation with one of the volunteers about scuba diving in Australia, all in all, very relaxing. Until the shark segment. One man walked into the room, ready to get stabbed in the arm, looked up and immediately went pale at the sight of a shark feeding frenzy blown up to cover almost the entire wall opposite him. Possibly not the best choice in movies for a blood drive.

Once a blood bed had opened up for me I was called into the other room. My blood pressure was taken, things were taped to my arm and I was given a stress ball to squeeze. The woman was just about ready to stick me when she looked at my huge vein, paused, and then brought out a sheet of the same material they make your bib out of at the dentists office. She put it between my shirt an my arm and told me it was in case my blood squirted out. How weird is that? I've never heard of blood escaping while the nurse takes it from your arm. At first I thought does my vein look like it's about to explode? Then, as I turned my head so as not to see the needle pierce my skin, I wondered if maybe she was just terribly incompetent and soon my blood would be everywhere. Thankfully, she was not incompetent and there was no blood squirtage during the entire donating process. As I sat there squeezing my stress ball every 3-5 seconds I realized why I had had to wait so long for a bed to open up. The beds on either side of me were occupied by people still recovering from their own blood letting ordeal. They were being feed plenty of juice and were asked if they were feeling alright every minute or so. Both ladies looked quite the worse for wear. Fortunately, another consequence of my massive veins is that I tend to fill their puny blood bags very quickly and was having my elbow pressure wrapped and walking out the door in no time, feeling slightly light headed and wondering if it would affect me any more since I was now living in a less oxygen rich atmosphere.