No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Papa Poop is a frequent blood donor and he asked me to meet him at CitiField for the Mets Blood Drive.
I took the train out there after work to do the good deed, get a ride home (he would take Chase out for lunch while Mrs. Poop and I slept) and get two free tickets to a Mets game in April.



When registering I was asked to do "Alyx" which is a special form of blood donation in which they take just your red blood cells.

So I got hooked up to the machines and the guy told me that when the pressure cuff is tight I should squeeze to pump my blood, but then the cuff would loosen, I should stop squeezing and it would send the platelets and other stuff back into my vein. We would go through three cycles of this.

But after the first cycle I did feel the cuff release pressure and I stopped squeezing but I may have been holding my fist too tight. I started to feel excrutiating pain and my arm swelled to three times the size. I thought it was unusual but figured it was what happened when they put blood into your vein. When the nurse turned around he was like "holy shit, didn't you feel that?" He explained I must not have relaxed my arm enough and the blood blood was trying to get out, while the machine was pumping it back into my arm, and the needle slowly pulled out of the vein, and pouring into my arm under the skin. He wrapped my up real tight and this is what my arm looked like the next day.



The regretable thing is that they were unable to use any of my blood which went right in the garbage. I still got my free tickets but I think I was punished for years of laughing at hematomas.