Sunday Morning Blood Donation

Sunday morning fellow cruiser Bob Smith of Pantera and I went to the local Hospital Salvatierra to give blood to be used for the credit of another long time La Paz gringo cruiser. Having worked at the Blood Donor Center at the University of Iowa for 5 years I was curious to see how our two systems compared. This was a bit less sophisticated I suppose but the staff was wonderful and very proficient in their jobs.

The pre-donation questions included a few questions I had never asked any donors to the U of Iowa, such as : when did you start having sex, how many partners have you had, how many partners have you had in the past 5 years and when did you last have sex?! Also I was asked how many children I had. When I responded 'none' my interviewer promptly asked me 'why not?!' As it turned out I did view a copy of the questions and answers as they were printed off the computer and these were all legitimate questions necessary to be answered before the donation procedure could progress.

This was a special surprise to me. It's a Fenwall CS3000 blood processor used to harvest white cells and platelets from donors and to do apheresis procedures on patients with a variety of medical conditions, usually auto-immune in nature. I used this exact make and model at the U of I 25-28 years ago!! This could have been shipped down here direct from the U of I or any other major blood center in the US. It even has all the labels in English. It may have been a donation or could have been purchased, of course, but it was like coming upon an old friend in an unlikely situation!

Special thanks goes to Enoc Fuentes Lopez and his lovely wife for their assistance in making these donations possible. Enoc not only arranged for the donations but his translations proved invaluable to the process of exchanging information prior to and during the donation process. And Enoc's wife graciously transported Bob and me back to the Marina after our donations while Enoc visited with the patient who was receiving the donation credits. According to Enoc and photos he emailed to me, the man seems to be rapidly on the mend.