Blood is totally awesome – just ask Dracula! And as it turns out, it’s transferable too – and it doesn’t even have to be via the fangs-in-neck method that our favourite vampire is so fond of. (Is Dracula our favourite vampire anymore? Who would win in a fight to the death between him and those Twilight hipsters? Twilight is about vampires, isn’t it?)
In support of this transferability, the Red Cross blood van was inconveniently parked right along our path from work to Nandos, and try as we might, we just couldn’t not notice it. It’s huge!
If I were the type of guy who was into pimping out caravans, I’d definitely be stealing some ideas from these guys; their air-conditioning is the hammer!
Anyway – they didn’t appear too busy, so after filling up on chicken and chips, Ben and I signed up to bleed. I’ve tried to donate blood in the past – once, and it was way back when I was working for Compaq down the Goldie. They turned me down! There was too much iron in my blood, so they were worried that I might have haemochromatosis – a disease which causes you to have too much iron in your blood.
Now however, many years later and haemochromatosis free, the Red Cross was only too happy to harvest my goods. Of course, donating blood isn’t a competitive sport, and yet somehow they managed to turn it in to one by equipping the van with a leaderboard for fast bleeders! Apparently anything under six minutes is fast, and I managed to bleed out in 5:52. Yeah! My name and time is now written onto that board for the rest of eternity, or at least until someone wipes it off at the end of the day. If only there was a trophy that I could have unlocked.
1 comment
Beat 5:40!! I donate regularly and I’m thinking of branching out into plasma donations which you can do every 2 weeks but only at the Donation Centres, not the vans.
I have only made the top bleeder board once but I am always trying to work out ways to get there again and beat my best score.