In which I am both awesome and not awesome at blood donation

[terriko]

I guess all those years in Albuquerque have made me extra resilient to blood-oxygen changes. I donated blood yesterday and I could barely even feel it today, even going up stairs.  Not even a bit of huffing and puffing! If it hadn't been for my sore finger and arm, I would have forgotten that I was supposed to still be drinking lots and taking it a bit easy.

Awesome part number two is that I have barely a bruise.  This is normally true for me, and wouldn't be surprising... except for the  less awesome part, which I'll put behind a cut for those who might not appreciate details about my blood donation.

I have pretty small veins (likely due to generally not being that big) so even with lots of water it can a bit of a pain to find the vein, but usually there's a whole lot of consternation while they search for it, and sometimes some arguing about using the outside vein instead of the one in the center.  (Not recommended on me; I had it fall out of my arm there once,  plus it hurts some.)  But once they do find the vein it's generally fine.

Not so much this time.  The poor phlebotomist missed my vein entirely.  Nothing was coming out. And then little wiggles didn't seem to be enough to get it working, so he resorted to little jabs, trying to snag the vein since he clearly hadn't gotten it at all.  Oi!  I don't think he would have kept trying except that I was so calm about it "eh, it happens.  do you need to try the other arm?"  The two people now looking on my arm helpfully tell me that I am rather abnormal in that I didn't give up on blood donation the first time I had something like this happen, but they're game to keep trying since I'm being encouraging and not freaked out and eventually they get it.

So I do most of the donation, whereupon it starts to dry up too early, and he has to start moving the needle again.  No luck.  They're moving things around and I wince and the guy is all "does that hurt?" and I respond "not really, but it feels really... squishy?" which apparently a sign that they should call the most experienced gal in the room.  (As I sort of suspected, it means that I'm oozing blood.)  She apparently has the magic touch, as she carefully arranges my arm just so and gets it flowing *really* well.  I quite enjoy her explanation to the other phlebotomist about how she thinks the needle had pushed up against the side and gotten suctioned closed, so she just needed to move it until she felt the <insert fluttery hand gesture that apparently reflects what it feels like when blood goes through the tube>.  I am highly amused.  I manage not to drip blood on the floor with the aid of more gauze.

All that wiggling normally would leave me with a big bruise, but it doesn't really look or feel worse than usual, so yeay!


End result, I have successfully donated blood yet again, I have suffered even fewer ill effects than one might expect, and I got to feel all heroic about having a hole in my arm and maybe saving a life. So yeay!

Comments

[puzzlement]

Glad it worked out for you and than you!

My own story:

Do small people generally have narrower blood vessels? Mine are approximately as narrow as yours by the sound of it, and so for obvious reasons I'd assumed it was independent of height.

I can't donate blood presently for unrelated reasons, but as of when I last did so, they would always keep trying up to the limit they were allowed because I am O- and had no CMV antibodies. It's possible I've had CMV now though, since I have kids in daycare. Once I test positive to it, I'll be fired the next time I donate afterwards for being too difficult to bleed.

In medical settings, I have a couple of times come close to the number of sticks various departments allow without trying an ankle, which the blood donation people will not do.

[terriko]

Hm, that's a good question. A quick search suggests first maybe not:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21287972

Acquiring data about venous or arterial vessel size is important for several reasons, given the increasing incidence of thomboembolic phenomena and arterial aneurysms and the emerging new vascular techniques. We studied 250 healthy subjects (125 men and 125 women; age range: 50 to 91 years) with no known vascular pathology, nor hypertension, nor diabetes. We assessed the caliber of abdominal aorta, inferior vena cava, iliac and femoral arteries and viens by color doppler ultrasonography, and analyzed the results with regard to sex, height, weight and body surface of each subject. The mean caliber measure of the large abdominal vessels appeared lower than the value obtained from cadavers. There was a direct proportion between the left and right vessels of the same subject. The difference in vessel caliber between male and female subjects was statistically significant. There was no correlation between vessel caliber and age, height or body surface area.

And then maybe so...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2297079

Cross-sectional internal diameter measurements were made of right and left common carotid and right femoral arteries and right and left internal jugular, superficial femoral, and common femoral veins in 32 normal human subjects utilizing duplex ultrasonography. The relationships of these vessel sizes to the subject's sex, age, height, weight, and body surface area were analyzed statistically; and graphs were constructed, indicating the relationship of blood vessel diameters to the various body size parameters. Findings indicate that 1) for the femoral veins, body surface area had the best correlation with the internal diameter of the vein; 2) for the right internal jugular vein, body weight had the best correlation with the internal diameter of the vein; 3) correlation between vein diameter and body size of the subject is better for the femoral veins than for the internal jugular veins; 4) internal diameter of the femoral and internal jugular veins increases about 20% when they are distended by 15 degrees of positional inclination of the subject's body; 5) neither age nor sex of the subject influences the positional distensibility of the veins examined; 6) the cross-sectional internal diameter of the femoral and internal jugular veins, as determined by duplex ultrasonography, closely relates to the external diameter of these vessels as measured by direct in vivo application of calipers and to the maximum outside diameter of cannula the vessel will accept.

So... I don't know either. I was going based on the fact that my sister and I have problems, but my sister and I share quite a bit more than just height.

Do you think they'd really fire you? I feel like here, they're so in constantly in need of blood that they're frustratingly frequent in their reminders (The red cross is definitely worse than Canadian blood services, including that they send me flyers suggesting that I do types of donation that I'm likely not even eligible for due to my smaller height/weight). I only know one person who got fired (in Canada, not the US) and it was more "please don't come back until you've seen a doctor about your blood pressure."

[puzzlement]

Interesting data.

It probably depends on who gets me on any given day, but I have 4 separate "Did Not Bleed" visits. (ie, both arms failed) and once a nurse was once actually in the middle of "while this is a great way to help people, perhaps in your case…" spiel once when she observed that I was seronegative for CMV and converted to giving me tips about bleeding more easily.

So, they came close to firing me!