Double red

[Hooked up to the apheresis machine, intake mode]

Depending on where I travel in El Salvador determines whether or not I can donate blood. If I stay put in San Salvador, there is no problem. But if I go to Usulután or Chalatenango, it is a one-year prohibition because they are malaria areas. This go-round, I was good to go.

This is the fourth time I have given a double-red donation. It's two for the price of one. They take out twice the amount of red cells, put back your plasma with saline solution and off you go. It takes 45 minutes and means you only can give once every four months but it also enables someone to receive double the amount of red cells from a sole donor (eventually one runs out of options when receiving transfusions).

Donating has been a rule of life ever since I first gave first year in college. The only time I have not donated for an extended amount of time was when the travel restrictions were three years for having travelled in a malaria country. (I wonder when they will count dengue?) Otherwise, I pretty much have been a regular giver.

This machine is interesting because it is a centrifuge. The machine separates the red cells from the plasma (that is the liquid in the bag in the picture). There are two lines — in and out — that go through one needle. The phlebotomist puts a cuff on your arm that squeezes it tightly to get a faster draw (5-7 minutes). It then releases and, after a second, the saline solution and platelets return via two separate lines — you feel a tingling in your lips and the coolness of temperature of the liquids as they enter your arm. Then the cuff tightens up again for round two. I have found that it is best to glug some cranberry juice and eat some cookies to get sugar into me so there is not the dropping elevator sensation. Otherwise, it is no big deal.

I do this mostly because we have yet to figure out how to manufacture artificially blood... and because something like 5% of elegible donors in the US actually gives.