On Who I Am and Donating Blood

Inside my head, I'm incredibly hip. After a long week of analyzing power spectra in Matlab, I spent Saturday afternoon in the park reading Will Eisner's "A Life Force". I read it while wearing a smock dress I've owned for months and after listening to Asobi Seksu and Deerhoof. Then I came home and ate my organic orange and jicama salad and thought about neurons and sweatshops. But after several hours of playing cool and thinking in self-conscious similes, it was time to do something. As a graduate student, I pass a lot of time thinking about research or stressing about the future. In this blog, I hope to re-claim the present.

Thing to Do #1: Donate Blood
I always pass the blood drive signs on campus but weasel out of donating by rationalizing that skipping out on my research at the last minute would be irresponsible. This made me feel guilty, so I signed up for an email notification of upcoming on-campus blood drives. Always on weekdays, work-related excuses are readily available. But what if, one lazy Saturday, I could go on an afternoon walk, donate blood, eat a couple of Oreos, and then go back to putzing around? And what if I did this more than once a year? Could I still justify browsing youTube for countless hours instead?

My obvious first stop was the American Red Cross. They link to My Health Test Reminder, a useful site that emails you when you need to go into routine health screenings and when you are next eligible to give blood. Further reading on the sister site introduced me to apheresis, an alternative to the traditional 10 minute blood donation. Briefly, this process removes selective components from the blood and then returns the remaining components to the donor's bloodstream. It takes approximately 35 minutes and is done by appointment only. On the upside, it is possible to donate more often and donors are matched with individual patients. I have sent an email to a medical student friend to ask whether there is a greater need for whole blood donations or apheresis-extracted platelets and plasma. I have also asked whether the answer is dependent on the donor's blood type.

As a side note, I strongly disagree with the rules preventing homosexual males from donating blood. A google search on the topic led to this fairly recent msnbc news story. Can someone explain how the FDA can claim their policy is not discriminatory?