I find it rather interesting that Blogger gives me quick buttons for Italics, Bold, and links. But not underline. However, they do have a block quote button as well. Strangeness. Eitherway, the new layout homepage tells me that this is my two-hundred and ninety-first post.

So, today we shall tell the horror story, well it's more of a humorous thing from a spectator's standpoint, anyways, of the rookie Red Cross employees:

Alright, so last...uhh...Thursday I believe it was, my entire family did the blood giving routine. My mother and I gave together in mid afternoon cause we were free then, and my father and David gave after they got back from their respective work and school. Either way, this trip was not the pinaccle of efficiency. For those of you who haven't given, the process works in two phases. First the screening, where they check Blood Pressure, Temperature, Ask you all the questions, Heart Rate, and prick your finger to test your iron, then the part where you actually give blood.

Anyways, my screening nurse was a little old lady who did one thing at a time. Usually the younger nurses blaze through the screening; taking heartrate, temperature, and blood pressure all at once which prepairing the finger prick, but not her. In fact, she had the hardest time getting the blood from the prick into the tube, at which point she couldn't open the test tube for the blood-iron content test, so I had to reach across with my left hand (my right was the bleeding one on the table) and unscrew the top. Apparently she had similiar difficulties with my father, and he was shooting blood out (at least so much as a finger can) so she lost the gauze in her haste to change out to cleaner gloves and had to get more. And she couldn't pronounce any of the various ailments in the questions for the screening. Course there are some difficult diseases to pronounce so that's not really a fault, it's just that she tried so many times at it that it got tedious.

Either way, I think the screener that both my mother and David had was no problem, or at least not that I've heard.

So I put on the bar code saying that I hadn't done anything that might result in me contracting AIDS and then lied about it on the questions and went out to get a chair to give blood in. Matthew, another rookie, was washing down the first chair with moist towlettes, so I figured I'd just take the second, but little old screening lady insisted I take the first one once he toweled it off, while little lady woman wandered off with all the stuff he needed to do so. So I sat down, and Matthew looked around confused, it went kinda like this:
Matt: "Umm...where's your stuff."
Me: "Oh, the little old lady walked off with it, she's somewhere over there."
Matt: "I see..." and off he went to retrieve it.

Apparently the aged one did the exact same thing with my father's stuff, again prompting Matthew to have to go off after her, the way he responding to my father telling him this it seemed like it was a near constant action on her part (wandering off without giving anyone the donor's blood bag). So, usually a blood nurse can siphon two or three people at once, all they need to do is move around shaking blood bags once they've stabbed you and gotten started. Either way, when Matthew asked which arm I wanted to give out of, I let him have his choice, my first mistake. Despite the fact that I still have a tiny spot from when I gave blood last time, he couldn't find my vein. So he moved onto my left arm and eventually decided that he could see the bulging vein when he had my circulation cut off, which does help you find veins, I'll give you, as any experience Heroin addict can tell you. Matthew did not move around and help other patients (admittly there weren't any at the time cause it was just my mother, Cindy who weighs way too little to be giving, and me) he just sat there and, as my father and I put it, babysat me. However, he cut off my circulation in the process. I give blood enough without the added force of no circulation, not to mention I imagine it's hard to give blood when you don't have any in the area, as evidenced by my white hand. Apparently he kept asking my father if he was losing circulation, guess he didn't want to repeat the mistake. Meanwhile the female rookie doing my mother had already stabbed one arm and failed to find a vein, so she was working on stabbing the other. She later in the day did David and according to him, only stabbed him once, but spent a good 3-5 minutes rummaging around inside his arm trying to stick the vein. So, in the aftermath, most of my family has a bruse from the rookies, mine being the largest. I've got a nice large yellow one extending from a hands-width above where I was stuck to halfway down to my wrist. It hurts too.
Not trying to scare you all out of giving blood, just giving you something to laugh at.