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Thursday 25 August 2011

One of my pet causes

Yeah, yeah, I told you I'd finish off our year abroad story, and I will sometime soon. Its a little emotionally draining for me and right now my brain can barely remember how to spell words like powder. Seriously. Not kidding. Last night I was chatting on msn to Corey and it took three goes before I got it right...I spelt it right to begin with, but it looked funny...

This morning, trawling through my blogs, I read yet another Any Other Wedding post that inspired me to write something. Seriously girls, even non married ones, its a wonderful blog to read and its not all about weddings. In it it talks about a woman that one of the bloggers met while in hospital and how this woman has to cope with the pain of sickle cell anemia. Its a nasty disease, horribly cruel. A vital part of your body just doesn't work properly and there is, currently, no cure. There is, however, one thing that is often essential to helping people with this disease: blood transfusions. Particularly if its a pregnant woman, or someone who is suffering badly from it, blood transfusions are a necessary part of their treatment.

So here's my plug: have you ever considered giving blood? I've been doing it on and off since I was 19 years old. I'm not squeamish and never had a problem with needles, but even if you do, it really doesn't hurt most times. It's 15 minutes of lying on a bed, with quite a soothing atmosphere as you give something that may very well save someone's life one day. Afterwards you get to eat as much junk food as you like with the excuse that you need to replenish your blood sugar. I also discovered I have O negative blood, which is something I kinda needed to know. It's the universal donor, anyone can have it. Seriously, anyone. But it means that it is in very short supply, only 7% of the population have this blood type, so I need to try and avoid needing a blood transfusion :P Secondly, I know now that I will need injections when pregnant/just after giving birth because should my baby be O + or anything else that's +, I will react to any future baby that has + blood type.

Oh, I also know I don't have HIV, Hepatitis B and C, Syphilis, Human T-lymphotropic virus (some weird disease that's apparently common in some populations, as well as Adult T cell Leukemia). Oh, they also check to see if you have enough iron in your blood before you give blood. So I know I'm not anemic. I also know I don't have chlamydia, but that's because the nurse at the doctors surgery persuaded me to take the test once (its good for the stats, she said, even if you know you don't have it). Anyway, it's also great fun to tell your father that you know you don't have all these sexually transmitted diseases. "WHY do you know all this?" I was asked. "I give blood, Daddy" was my reply.


Anyway, seriously, if you've never considered it before, even if your a little scared of needles (I'm not talking full blown phobia here, I'm talking just being afraid. If you have a phobia, you should probably deal with that first.), its about an hour out of your day, 4 times a year, for something that many, many people need.


http://www.blood.co.uk/index.asp is the link to the UK give blood site. Another cool thing: you can sign up to online registration which means you can see what your blood is used for. Mine tends to be used for pregnant women a lot...

http://www.anyotherwedding.com/  Any Other Wedding: read it, you won't regret it. Unless you have a dissertation to do...but even then, you'll probably regret having the dissertation to do because it distracts you from your blogs. Oh, and vote for them in the Cosmo blog awards. Because they are awesome and deserve the win. If you do vote for them, they are in the sex and relationships category.

2 comments:

  1. Such a lovely post. Yes for the giving blood. I can't give for a year and so I'm trying to find other people who don't usually donate.

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  2. Thank you! I try and persuade anyone who'll listen to me to give blood. It's really not that big a deal. But so many people don't believe me and they think it'll hurt lots.

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