Platelets
May 24, 2024
How I spent three hours of my day today….
That black thing is not a fashion accessory.. it’s a heated rice bag. The staff comes around and changes them every half hour or so. Off camera, I’m also fiddling with a heated rice bag in my right hand, per instruction. Keeps blood moving, I guess. My right arm has to stay put for the entire session, as it’s hooked up to machines via a needle in my arm and a tube that flows to and from it. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on here, because I don’t look, but it has something to do with extracting blood, separating out the platelets and returning the blood. I keep my blood, they keep my platelets. This is different than giving blood, where you leave the place a pint down. The advantage of giving platelets is that you feel completely fine afterwards because you have everything you came with… the thing you loose is time (and a little bag of yellow stuff they use for cancer patients, mostly. If I continue to give platelets, I’ll make an effort to understand exactly what I’m doing.
Life of Wry 