check your sugarcoat at the door

I like to think that Kiddo is so independent that she even chose when she would be born, despite my and any medical professional’s advice to bake in my oven for another month, at the least. Her early delivery resulted in significant blood loss for me. I’m all, here’s a warm home for you to chill in for a while, get comf, and she was all, DIE, MOM. Thanks, kid.

Since then I’ve always said I would donate blood. It’s the people that donate that were there for me when I was the almost-recipient of a large quantity of not-my-blood. (Luckily I did not need the transfusion and I just remained white(r) for several days.) Knowing it was there and it would have helped possibly save my life (I was very near death, apparently, but no one would tell me that because I’d already performed a Stage 5 FREAK OUT) inspired me to give, give give.

Then seven years happened when I wasn’t looking.

So I stopped making excuses and boarded this rumbling Red Cross bus up the street from work. In a room the size of an airplane bathroom, I answered personal questions such as whether or not I’d accepted money for sex between now and 1977. There was another grown woman in the room with me. There was no room for oxygen in there, let alone my sexual history. Which does not include money for sex in the seventies, as I was not here yet.

I’m not afraid of needles but I am afraid of anything medically related that I do not understand. (All of it.) When it took four nurses poking my right arm and then my left for a vein ‘suitable for this type of needle’ I almost checked out. (Apparently you’re supposed to eat and drink first. I did neither.) They were afraid of breaking the vein, I think they said, in which case I would have completely flipped the fuck out because, um, THEY BREAK? And how does one fix that? I don’t even want to know, don’t tell me.

So I chanted please don’t let me die on my lunch break a few hundred times while squeezing a stress ball, strapped to a blood pressure cuff, and consequently losing all feeling on one side and going numb from the freezing cold air they were blasting on me unnecessarily.

After a few minutes into the Draining of Jill, I decided I would definitely do that again. Up until that point though, I had nearly sworn off the big blood bus. The crush I developed on the nurse that was a ringer for Da Brat could have helped a little tiny bit.

So, mostly, suck. But overall, feel goody. “You’re paying it forward! With plasma!” -Jamie

“Your boob totally made a difference.” -Ashley

If anyone would like to come hold my hand on April 1st, that’d be lovely.

-CJ