It was with a small amount of trepidation that I swung up to The London Clinic at 08:50 this morning. First order of the day was a white blood cell count, which took 20 minutes or so to come back. In the meantime Grant The Nurse explained to me that as the recipient is a large person (110kg, apparently), the donation that has been asked for is large. I’m not sure what the numbers are, but generally a donation is 2 to 3, maybe a little more. A large donation would be 4. My recipient’s health professionals are asking for 5. There has been much sucking of teeth over this.

Grant’s proposed solution was basically to turn everything up to 11. It may mean more side effects, but there’s a chance I get to go home tonight if we get to within 10% of the requested amount.

And so, I get hooked up. A metal “out” needle in my left arm which means I have to remember not to bend or I’ll do myself an injury, and an “in” cannula in the other arm. An anticoagulant is added to my blood stream to make things flow faster, which might cause tingling in the face, hands & feet and possibly nausea.

A load more vials of blood were taken off for testing as well. Grant, entering into the spirit of the blogging thing, very kindly took this picture…

…and that was basically it for 4 hours. I listened to podcasts, read blogs and generally chilled. I didn’t get any tingling, but I did feel a bit nauseous, which, when I remembered I was supposed to flag side effects and get them dealt with, was dealt with swiftly & effectively.

So, at roughly 1:45pm the “out” was unhooked, and this picture, much to the amusement of my fellow harvest-ees, was Grant’s idea:

Lunch was served pretty much straight away – it was a cut above the usual hospital food, but they could have been a *little* more generous with the tuna&sweetcorn on my baked potato. And I don’t really count a chewy pain au chocolat as a “Danish”, but then we know I’m picky. Also, I was pretty much press ganged into having these scones, which would have been better with a brew…

So, having been unhooked, my crop was sent for analysis to see whether I need to come back tomorrow. In the meantime I went over to the park to cloud spot.

I spotted an excellent piranha attacking a fluffy bunny but by the time I got my phone out, they were gone. I pottered back for my results, which were unfortunately somewhat disappointing. We collected just over half of what’s been asked for, so I’m back for another 4 hour session tomorrow.
I feel a little bit down about this because I’m ready to go home now. Plus, I feel a bit bad about the time I’m taking off work. On the plus side, I’m now at large in London with a tube stuck in my arm…