I finally give blood today! I'm a first time donor and the experience was wonderful! My original plan was to spend the night (which I did) and Gabby got a chance to go home. It was her first 'real' break in a long time - maybe at least 4 to 5 days. The plan was that I'll leave early in the morning and go across from the children's hospital to the blood donation center and donate blood. Unfortunately I completely forgot about a 9 am test that Jonathan had to do so I thought my plans were going to be squashed.
Jonathan finished his tests at Nuclear Medicine around 10:30 am and by the time we came back to his room Gabby and Arielle had arrived from home. So I started back thinking on whether I should still try and do the blood donation - which would have made me arrive even later to work. So at 11:05 am I said, "what the hell" and was at the blood donation center. The thing is - my wait time was more than I expected but by 12:15 pm I was finally hooked up and blood was flowing. It took a little more than 4 minutes for my 1 pint of blood to come out and by 12:45 pm I was out of there. I've also decided to register at the bone marrow registry so in about two weeks I'll go back in so they can take some blood for testing and identification.
So now I have to wait 60 days before I can donate blood again, i.e. to the community. If I was doing a direct blood donation, i.e. for Jonathan, then I can donate every 4 to 7 days. The unfortunate thing is that a direct blood donation costs money - in this case about $90 - whereas donating to the community does not. It may be possible to get the insurance company to cover this cost - although I'm not sure - but I'll wait until tomorrow so I can find out my blood type. If I'm O negative - like Jonathan - then I'll enquire about having the insurance company cover these costs.
So it's 1:48 pm and I'm on Bart / train on my way to work. Super late today - but it just means my hours would shift appropriated - so I probably wouldn't be leaving until close to 10 pm today : (. I know there are times I was either living close to work or won the lottery so I didn't have to work - today being on of those times. I remember just a couple days ago I remarking to myself that I'm sure glad we didn't move in July. I had this big drive to try and move closer to work and it would have happened during the month of July - since that is when our lease for our current apartment would have expired. With all that has been happening in July - I don't see how we would have had the time to move - much less keep our sanity and have energy left over for ourselves. So ... in the end ... I've renewed the lease for another year - and decide I'll revisit that question again next year.
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