Blood Brother/Sister

I have long been a blood donor. I started making donations when I was in Montreal. It was easy to donate because clinics were held at McGill and it was easy to just stop in before or after class.

I stopped donating when I moved to Saskatoon. I think that it was simply because I was very busy and just didn't think about making time for it. Plus, it was out of my mind and any donation would require a special effort to plan and to attend.

I started donating again when I began work at the CBC. They hold clinics in the atrium every few months and again it was easy to attend. When I stopped working there, I still walked down and made donations there.

I thought that I should start going to a location that was closer to my house. I made my last donation about 10 blocks away from home and as I was recovering with my Peek Freans cookies and styrofoam cup with artificially peach flavoured sugar water, I read a pamphlet about platelet donation.

You can read the details here, but platelets are a part of blood cells that allow blood to clot. During the 90-minute donation, blood goes into a machine that removes the platelets. The blood is then returned to the body. Platelets are stored in the body and they are replaced in the blood quickly. Canadian Blood Services can make platelets by using the blood of as many as 8 donors, but this is costly and time consuming. The main difficulty is that platelets must be matched according to blood type, but also to HLA type. The chances of matching within a family is 1 in 4, and the chances of an unrelated match is 1 in 10,000. These are the same odds as finding a bone marrow match.

I have an appointment to donate platelets tomorrow. I was expecting to just have my platelets used as a blood product, but after getting a reminder call this morning, apparently there has been a match and my platelets will be going to a specific patient.

That makes me feel good and I expect that I will be donating frequently for a while now. I can donate every two weeks and so my arms are going to be a little cut up. At least I can know that my donation is going to make a difference to someone. I suppose that it always does, but this will seem more tangible.