Donating Blood

The other day some of my friends had gone to our usual coffee hangout when they saw a Blood Donation Van there. All of them donated blood and came back proud with their certificates and Donor ID cards. So the rest of us too decided to go ahead and donate blood the next time that van turned up.

I have never donated blood in my life, even though I am O+ve (Universal Donor), a healthy individual and almost 4 kilos overweight. And it hasn't been because I do not want to donate blood or because I am scared or anything. Its simply because I have never had an opportunity to donate blood and I never took the pains to create one by going to a hospital and doing the needful. So I was pretty much determined that this time come what may I am donating blood. Well anyways we had taken the phone number of the guy who managed the van, and the next time it came, we knew it one day prior and thus I was mentally prepared to give my blood.

However when the time came to actually enter the van and get hooked to the bag, my resolve totally faltered and eventually I couldn't do it. I don't exactly don't know why.

But mostly it is because I do not trust the system. In a country where people are inherently unsanitary, where biohazardous waste lies in heaps outside hospitals, where people lack even the basic civic sense, how can I go and agree that some one without even wearing gloves, poke a needle into me and draw my blood.

The van was pretty well equipped, no doubt about that, but the guy doing the tests which are conducted before donation, was doing them near the open door without any gloves. Two girls in lab coats were just sitting there without doing anything. How do I know that the needle is indeed sterile?

Donating your own blood is an extremely noble thing to do. Whether it saves someones life or not is immaterial. And even though we never know who receives our blood, I feel it is one of the most personal of all transactions.

I know people will say that even in a big hospital, there is no way of knowing for sure if the needle is sterile or not, that the doctor wearing the gloves would have worn them since morning handling loads of patients in between. That one can go to donate blood and very easily become unsuitable to be a donor for ever thereafter.

You might say this is a figment of my imagination, well I ask what if it is not. And if there is even the smallest possibility that this is not my imagination at work, then, well I do not need to donate my blood to anybody. After all I have my whole life ahead of me.