Donating Blood at Vitalant
A perfect opportunity presented itself when one of my good friends and old teammates, Jaime (JimJam) told me she works for Vitalant. Vitalant is a blood donating center. My 30b430 list casually came up in conversation and I was talking about wanting to find out my blood type/donate blood. Jaime said, "say less come visit me at work!" So I did! Made an appointment online and it was so easy.
Okay now onto the day of. I woke up to a text from JimJam telling me to eat breakfast and drink lots of water. I woke up and made some eggs with toast and drank 24floz of water. To start things off she took my blood pressure. 165/85. Yes, you read that right. If you're familiar with blood pressure you're like oh that's pretty high... If you aren't familiar (like I was) a normal BP is 120/60... Safe to say I was a little nervous for my first stabbing. That is when Jaime said, "Imma need you to calm down." Lots of nervous laughs and a little struggle to find my baby veins that were hiding away, but my favorite phlebotomist found a good one! The process of donating blood doesn't take very long. I was surprised at how fast I was done AND how much blood they collected. A full bag! Jaime showed it to me and I was like ok I can't look at that for too long or think about it too much or I'm gonna vom. Then I got my little goldfish snack and an apple juice and here I am writing a blog entry!
1/13/21 - Update I'm B+!!! Only 9% of the population is B+. I would recommend signing up with Vitalant to donate! They have a very user friendly website that gives you your results. With every result there are little ? circles that link you to pages with more information on what a normal cholesterol is, what the different percentages of blood types there are. I found it super interesting and got lost on there for like 30 minutes at least.
