I give and I give A Happy Mr Harpo strolled off to donate blood at the Red Cross, as he tends to do on occasion. I have my screening and haemoglobin test (the nurse said my haemoglobin was “very good” which is wonderfully pleasing. Indeed they usually say something like that whenever they see my haemoglobin levels. I feel it is one of my best features). So Our Hero Mr Harpo lies down on their padded table listening to the nursing staff joking about a girl who had just fainted and made a hole in the wall with her head as she fell — people are always fainting, they get two or three a week but they hadn't had anybody making a hole in the wall before and they were being quite witty about it.

So Mr Nurse takes my blood pressure and inserts the needle and they have a machine there that the weighs the blood as it comes out and measures the rate at which the blood is leaving the arm and mine was coming out really slowly so the nurse was moving the needle around trying to get the vein properly and nothing he tried worked. Usually a regular donation of 450ml takes ten minutes or a little longer. After more than twenty minutes my uncooperative circulatory system had given up only about 250ml and the nurse decided to call it a day and was doing his little manipulations with test tubes and moving around my needle again.

My arm was quite blue because of the cold and the tourniquet and suddenly my arm started gushing this almost black blood — all quite dramatic — and I had three nurses holding things and being witty at me: the staff there at the donation are a particularly jovial crew. So OK I apparently had a blood clot which was why the donation was so slow and caused this problem for the nurse. My nurse had to go into the other arm to get his tests (extra test tubes from each donor to test for all the bloodborne diseases which means that as of my previous donation I officially don't have hepatitis which is certainly a relief).

So now at the end of the process I have a bandage around each elbow and I sit down at a table in a different part of the room where they give you a bite to eat and a cup of coffee and I'm looking at the wall which has a humorous little head-sized hole in it and I can't bend either of my arms because of the bandages so I'm trying to drink orange juice and my Earl Grey like some bizarro goof, stretching my neck and bending over strangely — so the whole experience was rather amusing.

  ¶ 7:10 pm