Giving blood for the first time.

I gave blood for the first time the other day. Was walking home and saw the sign and said fuck it, now or never. I'm glad I did. The oncology department in UHL has been great to my father over the past few years and I felt like it was time to do my part to help out the health service. Every little helps and all that.

I hate needles so as you can imagine I was slightly jumpy at the thought of having one voluntarily stuck into me. Tattoos?? Hahaha. Not for this fella. The donation centre was in the Southcourt hotel which was 400 metres from my gaff so I knew I'd have no hassle getting home if I chickened out. The risks of that were damn high.

Intake started at 5pm so I said I'd get there at the start to beat the crowds. Ya, that didn't work out. There was 50 other people with the same idea so I popped into a chair for a long wait. I pulled out my phone to discover that, horror of horrors, I only had 23% left. Fuck sake. This was going to be fun. Happily an aul fella by the name of Tom sat down beside me and for the next 30 minutes happily fielded a barrage of questions from a nervous Tipperary man.

Finally I got to register. As a first time donor I had to give all my contact details and sign my life away. I was then given a form to fill out and a load of pencils that, well tbh, I fleeced those. The forms were slightly intimidating and I was surprised to see just how many barriers there are to giving blood in Ireland. Fella in love with a fella, no go. Ever lived in the UK between 1980-1996, no go. Like a touch of Colombian marching powder, get out. And so on and so forth. TBH there were so many restrictions it's a wonder they get any blood at all. Once the form was filled out I popped it in a box and waited.

And waited.

An hour later I was called by a nurse named Rachel into a cubicle where I had to confirm my name and date of birth. Then all the questions I'd ticked off were painstakingly gone through. I get the point in it all but Jesus you'd want to be patient. Finally she needed to do an iron test to see if I could donate. Sadly the fact that I'm a 39 year old man didn't stop me from smiling when she said Id feel a little prick on my finger. I'm still embarrassed about that. I needed an iron level of +13 to be able to donate and I passed that test with flying colours. I can't lie, at this stage I was sort of hoping I'd fail and get send home. That was not to be.

Back to the waiting area and I resigned myself to another hour of a wait. But here's where things started moving rapidly. Not 5 minutes later I was called. The fear kicked in. But in the end there was nothing to fear at all. The nurse taking my blood was a lovely Asian woman who's name I wouldn't have a chance of spelling and she explained the whole process to me. And best of all she had the needle in my arm before I could even squirm away from her. That was it. All I had to do then was lie there for the next 8 minutes occasionally making a fist to help the blood flow. When it was all over I just had to slowly rise to a sitting position and when there wasn't any dizziness I could go to the canteen for a drink and something sweet. Club orange and a purple shnack of course.

Something I'd been terrified about for years was something that really wasn't scary at all. The only hard part was the waiting and that part was unusually long because they were understaffed that night.

It's something that's well worth doing.

Just remember these three things.

Don't go if you are sick.

Drink and eat plenty beforehand.

Don't get up too quickly at the end.

You'll be delighted with yourself if you go. It feels good to do something good.