Blood Circulation...

Time to give back? :-)

Just a nice experience I thought I'd share with you guys.

P and I donated blood on Sunday. No urgent need, no friends or relatives in hospital...just that a social service and cultural activities club that we'd been part of in our 'youth' was in revival mode and was holding a Blood Donation Camp in Kolkata. We decided to join in from where we were, in red solidarity :-)

Nothing extra-ordinary about our intent or action, I'm just writing to share a couple of nice things from the experience. One, it feels good. You see the warm red stuff come out of your arm and fill a bag and you know its going to help someone in need. Simple and effective. My kind of good deed.

Two, in our search to find a place that would let us do our bit without leaving a bad taste in our mouths, we picked the Max Devki Devi Super Specialty Hospital in Saket.

I'd been to the institution once earlier, and had not had a good experience.

It struck me as large, rich, impersonal, out to suck money in the fine way that corporate medicine (and Indian corporate education institutions) have made their trademark. As if the overpriced medical services and the ill-informed staff were not enough, the bitter cherry on it all was the Rs.30/- parking ticket, that too after having had to drive around for 15 minutes and park a good half kilometer away from where I needed to go (valet parking available at Rs.60 :-)

And yet, we returned, this time, to give voluntarily...simply because, of the Red Cross Society- approved Blood Banks, this was most conveniently located from our home and seemed to offer at least the level of cleanliness and hygiene that can be critical in endeavors involving blood.

So, with mixed feelings, we set out on Sunday morning, after breakfast. And I'm glad to report that we were pleasantly surprised, till almost the very end of our outing.

The parking guy at the entry gate let us double park in netural gear, when he learnt that we were looking for the Blood Bank, to make a voluntary donation. After this, we were guided courteously to our destination, welcomed by a pleasant doctor, who after checking our BP, sent us on to a nice, professional nurse (rare, non-mallu at that :-)

The form-filling was painless, as was the the actual blood donation. The facility was neat, the air-conditioning worked fine, the blood collection bag and needle were sterilised and pre-sealed, the support staff knew what they were doing, right down to disposing the medical waste from the procedure in the correctly labelled, separate bio-waste bins.

The whole thing was done professionally and after we had each shed 450 ml, we were given light refreshments, caps & mugs with blood donation slogans on them and thank-you letters from the Hospital.

P wondered if all this was too good to be true and wanted to know if our blood would end up being 'sold' by the big bad corporate. What the nurse told us, without any hesitation, was that voluntary blood donations go to either poor people, who often came there without enough resources or to foreign patients, who came without relatives or friends who could act as donors.

I can't honestly say that this answered her question fully, but there was no attempt to hide anything and we decided to accept it at face value.

When we stepped out of the hospital building, having done the deed we set out to, less than 50 minutes had passed since we'd stepped in. Pretty good, no? We still had the daylight 30-rupee parking robbery to remind us of where we were, but we were not going to let that spoil the whole experience.

I think a lot of people who would like to / be willing to donate blood, if the they could have the same sort of pleasant experience that P and I had this Sunday. What do you say?

As for me, I've known I could donate blood every 3 months; for the first time though, I think I actually might.