After playing a surprising game of phone tag with the blood services people, I finally managed to talk with someone about donating platelets. They said that because I have a positive blood type, it would be better for me to go the quicker route of donating whole blood for them to extract the platelets from rather than using the plateletpheresis machine which there are limited appointments for, so they prefer to use them for people with negative blood types – it makes sense.
Saturday (which was cancerfree2003’s birthday), I made an appointment and went in. My iron was high (yay!) so I filled out the paperwork and waited. I spoke with the nurse and was all ready to go, then she took my temperature. Too high. I explained that I’d had a warm bath before leaving, and we were having a mini heat wave outside – I tend to get quite warm, but felt top notch health wise. We waited 15 minutes and tried again, but I was still 37.8 and needed to be 37.5. Very disappointing.
Fortunately I don’t need to wait the usual 3 months between tries, so I’ll go in on a cooler day and skip the soak beforehand. I’ll check this off following my next accepted draining. AND if I can convince someone out there with a negative blood type to go in for donation as well, it would make me really, really happy.
