Copyright 1997 by Joel Keith Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)
It was around seven-thirty on a Monday evening, two days before Christmas. With fewer than 24 hours left in the holiday shopping season, there I was, staggering around a mall. I was exhausted, drained, chalk-white, toting bags and packages aplenty, looking for just a few more items to round out the gifts I was giving my fiancée.
I was far from the only shopper in South Square Mall that evening displaying signs of advanced fatigue - in fact, to cite but one example, you could find many individuals more emotionally and physically depleted than I in the crowd which had gathered around the entrance to the Kay-Bee Toys store, muttering "ratzen fratzen Elmo grumble grumble Elmo" in sad, worried tones.
I don't really enjoy Christmas shopping, as a rule. It's a lot of work. I know that I could just ask each friend and family member what they'd like and then go buy exactly that, but that's not Christmas. If that were all there were to Christmas, we could all save each other the trouble and just go buy ourselves everything we've been wishing for. Instead, I prefer to purchase things my friends and family will like but might not ever have thought of buying for themselves. I like seeing someone open a gift and peer quizzically at the item inside, their face widening to a smile as they think "hey, cool!" You don't get that kind of reaction when you go, list in hand, to K-Mart and dutifully buy everyone exactly what they asked for. Unfortunately, this devotion to the principle of the cool surprise typically makes for a long, enervating Christmas season each year, and 1996 was no exception.
This year was different in one respect, however. By the time I arrived at South Square Mall that Monday evening, intent on my final round of present- buying, I'd already stopped off on the way and given one gift to a complete stranger, and it was that gift that, more than any other reason, had left me feeling so drained and emptied.
The gift in question? The first pint of blood I'd ever donated in my 29 years on the planet. Given that the average human body contains 10-12 pints of blood, I'd surrendered 8-10% of my body's supply of circulatory fluid and, therefore, had ample reason for feeling slightly enfeebled that evening.
Despite feeling more than a little wrung-out-and-hung-up-to-dry after a full working day and after donating a pint of blood, I nonetheless managed to feel a certain subdued pride as I lurched around the mall wearing a Red Cross "I Donated Blood" sticker on my lapel. Having been told that fewer than 5% of people donate blood (give or take, depending on the locality) and that most of those people only donate once per year, I felt pretty good.
Unfortunately, not a single soul so much as glanced at my Red Cross sticker as I navigated the hordes. I hadn't given blood in order to make random strangers in a mall think better of me, so I was not greatly sorrowed by their inattention. I was more interested in the reaction from my friends and family, many of whom had, over the years, heard me rant about blood-drive workers in angry tones of voice on many occasions.
I come, on my father's side, from a family of North Carolinians who share a common blood trait, rather rare except among certain people who can trace their ancestry back to the Mediterranean area, which results in lifelong anemia and lower blood oxygen capacity. It's hereditary, but not disabling or really all that much of a bother to have; the main annoyance which results from it is double-takes by doctors and hospital lab workers who look at my blood and notice that the cells look somewhat different than most. My father, who earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Duke University in the 1950's and who spent some time working at the nuclear laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had it even worse than I did. Dad's blood was routinely tested during his graduate student work at Oak Ridge in order to detect overexposure to radiation... meaning that, now and then, the various supervisors he worked under came to him in a state of blind panic, certain that he'd received a fatal dose.
Of my two biological siblings, my older sister Julia and I share our father's blood trait, "hemoglobin C" as the doctors called it. Oddly, when my younger brother Robin was born, he was diagnosed as having a different trait, "thalassemia minor" or "beta thalassemia." This was a very similar, but genetically distinct trait that was not known to exist in our bloodline, so it was generally assumed that Robin was a mutant.
I led a normal life with my blood trait - somewhat anemic due to the trait, but otherwise pretty normal. No prolonged bleeding, no need for transfusions, none of that - just less than normal oxygen capacity in my red cells and somewhat less than normal longevity for said cells. Plus, as I said above, my red cells apparently look a little odd.
When I got to be old enough to give blood, in the mid-eighties, running charity blood drives came to be a very popular event for various non-profit organizations. At one point, I had no fewer than three friends and one friend's sister all pestering me to give blood at their various blood drives. In each case, I told them about my blood trait and about how my father had always had his blood refused by the Red Cross, and always got asked "What, is it infectious?"
Yes, our blood mutates those who come in contact with it into beings just like us.
More seriously, the Red Cross never wanted Dad's blood because he was, technically, somewhat anemic and because his blood wouldn't last as long in a blood bank as the average bag of gore. Since we had the same trait, I reasoned that giving of my blood would be a waste of time - and on each occasion where I actually encountered trained health care professionals with some experience with blood traits, I was told "That's right; we wouldn't want you to donate."
I wouldn't be fibbing to say that my blood trait caused me no little annoyance during my undergraduate years at the University of Georgia. One of the local service fraternities at Georgia was very fond of sponsoring blood drives in the lobbies of various of the large dormitories, including one that I had to walk through in order to get from the dorm where I lived to the nearest dining hall. These people had plainly received a great deal of coaching from their advisors about various ways to ensure that their blood quota was more than met each drive; they'd call out to passersby in tones calculated to induce extreme guilt in the mind and heart of anyone so selfish as to keep on heading chow- wards when there were people dying in the hospital due to lack of blood.
I'd always stop and say "Look, I can't give blood."
"Can't?" they'd echo, looking extremely skeptical.
"Yes," I'd explain. "I'm anemic."
They'd look up at me, 6'2" in height, moderately tanned, of average weight and no visible infirmity, and wrinkle their eyebrows in disgust at my lame and obviously dissembling excuse. "Look," they'd say, "If you're afraid of the needle, just say so. No need to lie."
"I'm not," I'd assert. "I'd love to give blood, but trust me, you won't take it."
It made for ill feelings on both sides. I wanted to give blood, but knew they wouldn't have any use for it once they ran it past the lab... and didn't exactly appreciate being told that I was a coward.
I suppose I could have said I was an intravenous drug user, homosexual, or, what the hell, a Haitian, but Georgia being Georgia, word would have gotten around had I claimed any of those to be the case and people would have started looking at me in an even more curious way from then on.
I got so sick of being asked to give blood and having to turn people down, only to get glared at, that I even put a section about my blood in the list of "Frequently Asked Questions about Joel Furr" that I published on the Internet.
Years passed. My brother Robin, at some point, succeeded in giving blood; the Red Cross had apparently decided, at some point between his birth and 1995 that "thalassemia minor" was okay after all and agreed to let him donate. This made me more cross than ever; why could HE give blood, if I couldn't? I felt less than completely human in some ways - possessed of blood so inferior that people desperate for blood donors would turn their noses up at it.
Then two things happened: my father, having gotten on in years, went in for a medical visit of some sort and had his blood re-diagnosed as having the "thalassemia minor" trait instead of "hemoglobin C"; my sister, Julia, got pregnant and, during the myriad of tests that all mothers inevitably are subjected to after discovering the happy news, was also diagnosed as having "thalassemia minor" instead of "hemoglobin C."
It seems that the state of blood testing in the period between 1950 and 1970 had been iffy at best and what had been "thalassemia minor" all along had been lumped into the category of "hemoglobin C" by a disinterested population of blood lab researchers.
The upside of this was that if Dad had thalassemia minor and Julia had thalassemia minor and Rob had thalassemia minor, then the odds of my nonetheless having "hemoglobin C" were extremely long indeed. In fact, were I to have that trait after all, I would be the mutant, not my younger brother Robin.
Why did this matter?
Well, the Red Cross still won't take "hemoglobin C" trait blood, but they will take "thalassemia minor" trait blood.
Meaning that I, after years of giving a surly lecture to overenthusiastic blood bank volunteers each time we crossed paths, could give blood.
The idea was somewhat startling to someone who'd lived a couple of decades under the cloud of having defective blood.
In fact, even after having received the glad news, I didn't immediately rush off to donate. This was partly because I had no idea where to go and no idea what I would say to the people at the desk. I could imagine myself standing there, reciting in a sing-song voice the strange and horrible story of my blood and hoping they'd make heads or tails of it all.
Things came to a head a few days before Christmas when I was driving home from work and heard, broadcast over the radio, a desperate plea for blood from the head of the local Red Cross. It seemed that their stocks of blood in several groups were at extremely low levels and they expected higher than normal demand, it being Christmas and people doing all that drinking and driving to say nothing of the knife-fighting 'round the Christmas tree in certain of the more disreputable parts of town.
Consequently, I had some serious thinking to do. I have always valued the idea of blood donation and, safe in my inability to actually donate, had always sanctimoniously told myself that I would give blood, if only I were actually able to do so.
Now I was able, and they needed blood, so what was I going to do?
Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself noting down the address for the blood center and noting down the hours they were open; it appeared that the best time for me to donate, if I was going to donate at all, was going to be sometime after work the coming Monday. The center was open until 7 pm and no appointment was needed.
That Monday, the last day I had to work before I got time off for Christmas, I made a mental note to head directly to the Red Cross facility immediately after work. Unfortunately, come the end of work, after a long day spent training inexperienced computer users in the wonders of Microsoft Word's advanced features (styles, frames, graphics, macros, etc. etc.), I was dog tired and found myself walking up the front steps of my apartment building in a kind of daze before it occurred to me that I'd planned to give blood that afternoon.
My fiancee' got home a few minutes later and, after the usual how-was-your-day preliminaries, asked me what I was going to do that night. I needed to finish my Christmas shopping (and didn't really want to hint how much I had left to do, only two days before Christmas), but I also wanted to see if I could somehow make it to a blood donor center before they closed for the day.
I tried and tried to reach the Durham blood center, but none of the numbers listed in the phone book resulted in an answer - just endless voice mail citing their hours. According to the recording, they were open until 7 p.m., and here it was only 6 p.m. Perhaps they'd failed to find people to work on the holiday evening, I thought. Shrugging, I said farewell to my fiancee', and headed out.
As it happens, the Red Cross headquarters was on the same road as South Square Mall, where I was heading anyway, so I turned left when I got to the mall and kept heading west, eyeing the building numbers and looking for their sign. It took some doing to find them - they were on the edge of town, tucked back in a large building concealed behind other large buildings in a modern office- complex sort of thing, in the middle of a mazy series of interconnected parking lots of the sort that are almost impossible to legally enter and exit.
Their lights were on, so I parked and went inside. It was obvious from the start that I was in the right place: a long row of chairs faced a cluster of oddly-shaped couches. A few nervous people sat in the chairs reading copies of "Diabetes Today" and the Red Cross newsletter while waiting their turn to lie down on one of the couches to be tended to by the white-coated lab staff.
I had to run a regular gantlet in order to actually get through to donating point. Part of this was my fault; I was so nervous about wasting their time with my possibly useless blood that I wanted to talk to someone about it before going through the paperwork and so forth. I had to start out with a receptionist, who knew nothing about acceptable and unacceptable blood traits but who took my name and social security number down and pressed a free "Blood Donor" t-shirt on me. The receptionist eventually located a member of the staff who, evidently expecting to be told something delicate and possibly embarrassing, refused to talk to me about my "problem" until we were safely back in a little cubicle, off to one side.
I explained
that I wanted to donate, had never done so before because I thought my blood trait
was on the banned list, and that I wanted some sort of reassurance that I wouldn't
be wasting anyone's time by donating useless corpuscles if I actually went through
with it. Once I got the well-meaning but somewhat harried staffer to understand
that she had someone in her cubicle who had neither engaged in homosexual activities
nor used drugs intravenously and who just wanted to have his blood trait looked
up in a book, she rummaged around in her desk until she found the three-ring binder
I'd sort of expected would be there and pored through the pages until she found
| THALASSEMIA MINOR | ACCEPT |
and nodded encouragingly to me.
That being taken care of, I was now routed into the chute any first-time donor had to endure. I gave one staffer my complete name, phone number (home AND work), address (home AND work), etcetera, etcetera. A whole host of personal questions was asked: had I had unprotected homosexual activities, had I ever paid someone for sex, had I ever been paid for sex, had I ever had sexual intercourse with someone who had ever paid for or been paid for sex, had I ever had hepatitis, had I ever had a tattoo, had I ever been outside the USA and Canada, and so on, and so on. As I recall, the only question I answered "yes" to was "Have you been outside the USA in the last X months?" I said "Well, I spent about an hour in Tijuana in July of 1995, but I only had one beer and came right back." That, apparently, was not enough to get me banned.
Incidentally, they did make me roll up both my sleeves to prove that I had no needle marks on either arms. Thoroughness, thy name is today's American Red Cross.
After that, I had to have a few drops of blood taken from my left ear and dropped into a vial of blue fluid. If the blood had risen to the top, I would have been told "Sorry, you're too anemic to give blood, but thanks for trying." Up to the moment that my blood stayed put on the bottom of the vial in a promising and friendly way, I had still been somewhat nervous that I might still qualify as too "anemic" to give blood.
The thing that struck me as truly odd, and something which my fiancee had to explain to me later, was when we had gone through the whole rigmarole and I was almost to the lying-down-and-getting-stuck stage. The technician handed me my form, all filled out, and two barcoded stickers. I was told "If you decide that for some reason, despite all this, you really don't think your blood should be used, stick this sticker on this place on the form. Otherwise, if you really, really don't know of any reason why your blood shouldn't be used, put this sticker on the form. Then come on out and we'll get you set up on a couch."
At that time, I had no idea why someone would be willing to go through the whole painful process of giving blood if they'd already put a sticker on their form which would result in the blood being thrown out, unused. My fiancee' had to tell me, when I got home, that occasionally people are pressured by their friends and co-workers to donate and that the barcoded stickers give some people, nervous or worried about admitting intravenous drug use or homosexual activities in front of their friends, co-workers, or family members, an out that lets them be seen going through the whole donation process without then admitting tainted blood into the banks. Those people could happily say "Yes, I'm clean as a whistle," smile at their co-workers, stick the mystery "Don't use my blood" barcode onto their form, and know everything was A-OK.
At the time, though, I didn't put two and two together and realize this; I just stuck the "sure, I'm OK" sticker on my form, tossed the other one out, and went to take my seat waiting to donate.
I was virtually the last person to donate that night; as I was waiting, all the other donors finished up, save one other guy who came in at the same time I did, an EMT who knew everyone in the center and who made me mildly nervous by chatting with the techs about Red Cross gossip ("I hear you didn't make quota last month?" "Yeah, we're about to go out on the streets and start kidnapping people") while I was on the neighboring couch.
I only got told about a hundred times, once I climbed up on my couch and waited to be stuck, that there would be some pain, but that the "burning" would go away after a minute or so. I also got asked, repeatedly, if I didn't want something to drink during the ten minutes or so it would take to drain a pint of blood. Since I had every intention of staring fixedly off into the middle distance during the entire process and doing everything possible not to look at my arm, much less sit there cheerily sipping a soda, I demurred repeatedly. "No, thanks," I said. "I'll just lie here like a zombie, it's my first time, don't mind me."
I may have made the techs a little nervous; I was trying so hard not to babble nervously or otherwise betray my uneasiness that I'm sure I did sixteen slightly odd little things. I know I was smiling a tight little grin meant to reassure but which probably accomplished much the opposite.
When the moment finally came, once I was duly swabbed and prepared, for them to jab me, I had to make a fist - something which, combined with the fact that they'd put a tourniquet on my upper arm, made the skin on the inside of my elbow tight as a snare drum. They warned me one more time about the burning and I nodded stiffly and gritted my teeth.
The pain was not long in coming; there was a sharp momentary pain that soon settled down into something which, if you wanted to be vague about it, one might call burning but which I'd prefer to call "ow!" A nice long sort of "ow!" - the sort that varied up and down but always sort of stung. It was nothing I couldn't bear, but it didn't go away after one minute - which depressed me for a few moments, as I'd been counting the seconds to help pass the time.
The pain did eventually settle down to something barely noticeable. For all I know, that may be why they kept asking me, every ninety seconds or so, if I wanted something to drink. I know they were worried, as they would be about anyone, about fluid replacement and blood sugar and so forth, but I knew that they had a little canteen (as they called it) a few yards away at the other end of the room and was sure I could get there when the process was all over. I'd pass on the soda until then. I began to wonder, therefore, if they didn't keep asking as a way of distracting donors from what was going on.
If so, it worked.
I didn't look in the direction of my arm until it was all over and the needle had been removed, the bag o' blood all stoppered up, and the incision swabbed with disinfectant and bandaged. Then, as they were taking the bag of blood away, I asked if I could see it. Bemusedly, the technician in question held it up: a dark red bag of something that, for want of anything else to compare it to, reminded me in a obscure sort of way to the pouches of goo astronauts are reputed to eat. There was a certain space-age quality to the packaging that resulted in my almost overlooking, for a moment, the fact that there was one pint of me in that bag, being carried off, to end up who knows where.
They had me lie there in the couch for a minute or three before they told me I was all done and had me wander down to the "canteen" at the end of the room, a small nook with a soda dispenser and a basket full of Lance snack cakes, manned by a elderly gentleman volunteer who helped me sign up for an appointment in the middle of February and who brought me refills of Coca-Cola in small Dixie cups until I felt as though I was okay to leave.
To be completely honest, I didn't feel weak, per se, so much as I felt sort of down. I felt a little underpowered, true, but it was more an emotional tiredness than an outright physical tiredness. I moped out to the car, drove slowly and deliberately the few blocks up to the mall again, and went on in to finish my shopping.
I managed to buy almost everything I needed, save only a few items I'd pick up the next day at the grocery store, but somehow, having given blood for the first time in my life left me without much enthusiasm for the shopping process. Imagine going Christmas shopping right after losing your job or breaking up with your significant other; tone that level of the blues down by about two thirds and you're in the neighborhood of how I felt. In other words, it's sort of hard to feel a lot of Christmas cheer when you're feeling a significant happiness deficit. Of course, I had worked hard all day and it was well into the evening, but I'm sure much of the dolor I felt was the result of missing about a pint of vital fluids.
I made it home with no complications or travails of the road and suitably impressed my fiancee', who noted the "I Donated Blood" sticker on my jacket and compared me favorably to her father, who's up around the six gallon mark after years of donating. I said something along the lines of "Blargh" and went off to bed.
Christmas and the new year came and went, and all was well in my household. I hoped my blood was going to be of use to the Red Cross and wore my new "Blood Donor" t-shirt out on the town on a couple of occasions, but otherwise didn't think much about what'd transpired.
Except, that is, when I checked the mail each day. I knew that eventually I'd be receiving a donor card with my actual blood type - something I've never known - on it and, if there was any reason why they wouldn't want me to donate again, a letter telling me why. It was going to be pretty mortifying if I did get a letter saying "Dear Mr. Furr: Thanks, but no thanks. P.S. Send back the t-shirt."
Finally, on January 10, the expected mail came from the Red Cross. I knew right away, when I handled the envelope, that no letter was inside - just one flimsy piece of paper, with something semi-rigid and plastic attached. I ripped it open and found, to my delight, a card which read:
American Red Cross Volunteer Blood Donor Card
And on it, printed right there next to my name, was my blood type: O Neg. As long as I'd lived, I'd known more about an obscure blood trait I thought I had than about what actual blood type I was. Now, finally, all the confusion, misinformation, and outright mystification had been cleared up.
I, Joel Furr, could give blood. I, Joel Furr, am of the blood type which, as my fiancee' promptly put it upon seeing my card, makes me the Universal Blood Donor: O Negative.
Looks like there isn't anything "wrong" with my blood after all. I'm going to carry that card with pride... and I don't plan to miss any donation appointments. I may have started donating rather late in life, but you know what they say: Better late than never.
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