British authors and giving blood

So my son had any epiphany tonight. Dad: ‘How do you like The Fellowship of the Ring’? Son: ‘It's pretty good, but there’s some slow parts.’ Dad: ‘That’s cuz the author is British’. Son: ‘I didn’t know JRR Tolkien was British. . . Dad, I just realized something. Did you know that most British authors’ names start with the letter J? JRR Tolkien, and JK Rowling, and. . . Weird huh’. Dad: ‘Well I guess you summed up the majority of great British writing with those two authors.’ When he gets older, I’m hoping he discovers J Rudyard Kipling, John Locke, John Milton and all the other unknown English authors whose names start with J (and maybe even some that don’t).

So the ‘red cross’ came to the Changchun American School last Saturday. I couldn’t turn down a request to see what blood donation looks like in China. So I showed up at 11:00 am at the school and asked what room I needed to go to in order to give. They told me I had to fill out the form first. Now I’ve given blood enough in the US to know how to fill those 20 page forms out pretty quickly (even with the mandatory information pamphlet reading). This one was a bit trickier in that they ran out of English forms. My Chinese is still a bit rusty, so I had a translator help me out. “Name, age, date of birth, sex, occupation, phone #, blah, blah, blah”. OK on to the backside. “These 40 items are a list of things that you can’t do if you want to give blood. Just check the box in front of each one and then sign on the bottom”. Now I don’t normally read the questions too closely in America, but I’ve never filled out an entire form without having any idea what I was checking. I must look like a pretty innocent guy as the translator assumed there was no way I would have to answer ‘yes’ to any of ‘those’ questions.

Also, there was a choice of how much blood I wanted to donate: 300, 400, or 500 ml. This is a bit intimidating. I’ve never been asked how much they could take before. They just take it. I think it’s a pint, but I’m not sure. How many ml is a pint? 100? 200? Are they gonna take my blood until I pass out? Turns out ‘typical’ blood donation in the US and EU is 500 ml, so they were only taking volumes on the low end. Big sigh of relief.

‘OK, form is filled out, where do I go?’ ‘Go to the bus’. ‘To the bus?’ ‘To the bus’. ‘OK, to the bus’. Not sure where I need to go, but sometimes it pays not to ask questions. Turns out the bus in the parking lot was a mobile blood donation center. When you can’t count on the conditions of the buildings you are going to use as collection centers, you just bring your own collection center to the parking lot. Check in area, blood quality test station, reclining donation car seats, and a refrigerator for the final product all in a 1-stop shop. Pretty slick little system really. 3 donors at a time.

The best part of the day for me was the number of people who were rejected during the blood test. Nurse would take a sample, test for this and that and then say ‘you can’t give blood today’ in Chinese. The person would always say ‘why’ and the nurse would always say ‘You are too tired’. Then all the westerners would laugh and the ‘too tired person’ invariably would say ‘what did you test in my blood that told you I was too tired?’ The nurse would smile, say nothing and hand the guy his coat. 16 of 37 donators were rejected for being too tired on this particular morning.

Finally, the other great part of the day was Gerald donating (probably better for me than for him). He made it through the ‘too tired’ screening, but when they put the needle in his arm, the nurse kept trying to get him to lie back in the car seat donating chair. Not sure what Gerald was doing wrong, but they didn’t like his style. Finally they got tired of trying to get him to do it the right way, so they pulled the plug on him. Not sure what went wrong, but he ended up having to lie down on the couch while they cleaned the 6” of blood off his arm. Maybe he wasn’t tired enough.