savin' 3 lives

i gave blood today for the first time, it was an interesting experience. My friend asked me at the beginning of the school year if I could give for her sorority Kappa Delta (the fact that I'm involved with sorority functions is another story for another day). Well it started out with a group of us and a million other college kids waiting in line for about 45 minutes. Finally about 20 minutes, a dozen questions, and an extremely painful finger prick later we find ourselves sitting and waiting to give blood.

I don't know if you know anything about these people that work for the red cross and take blood, but they're not exactly professional nurses. I'm not one to complain but I watched at least 3 people come after me, give, and leave before I even saw my person. Finally after sitting and watching multiple pale white people get carted away for at least 20 minutes my person comes. She mumbles the whole time, I think I only comprehended about half her words. Despite waiting a frustrating amount of time, the giving blood part goes fine enough. That is until the end when my ever so professional nurse messes up.

There's a few test tube looking things that must be filled up prior to you being done to make sure you really don't have AIDS or something unusual with your blood. Well apparently my person let the tube that goes from the vein to the bad twist just enough that there wasn't enough blood left to go in the test tubes. So she proceeds to MOVE AND TWIST THE NEEDLE!! "I'll have to stick you again" is what she said. Safe to say I wanted to punch her and say a few choice words. Do you know how painful a needle inside your vein is when it's moved around? I pray that nobody ever has to feel that pain. Well just as I was about to call her bluff and say "no" another nurse took over insisting that mine take her break. This one actually knew what she was doing and I barely felt a thing when she had to stab me in my other arm.

Well at this moment my left arm is somewhat unusable, I'm left handed. I put sole blame on the chick who didn't know what she was doing. But nonetheless I got to hang out with some good friends and give blood for a good cause. So I'll probably give it another shot sometime in the future cause it's okay that I'm uncomfortable as long as it helps people.