Brain Surgery College Credo: If You're Pale, Go To Yale.

If memory serves, I first started working out in a gym when I was nineteen. I'd just been turned away by the “You Bleed It, We Need It” plasma sales center because my arms were three inches in diameter and completely veinless. It was like trying to find a vein in a piece of elbow macaroni. The medical student staff—after running several somewhat inconclusive tests to determine that I was actually a human and not a giant, pulsating lasagna—sent me on my way with all my plasma and instructions to do some bicep curls or to occasionally lift my arms above my head or something. And to stop drenching myself in marinara sauce because that was just misleading.

So I started going to the university workout center. There was liquid cash pulsing through my tiny, limp veins and by God, I was going to suck it out. That unlimited monthly membership at Tropique-All Tan wasn’t going to pay for itself. Suffice it to say, all the money I was making actually working was going toward my tuition at Brain Surgery College. After a couple of weeks curling toilet paper rolls and washing my hair for extended periods of time, I went back to the plasma center with one proud trembling blue vein shimmering in my right elbowpit. A vein that was promptly strapped to a ripped vinyl chair arm and pillaged ruthlessly. Have you ever sold plasma? It’s the opposite of donating blood in almost every capacity. First off, you donate blood because you’re driven by an altruistic yearning to help your fellow man; you sell plasma for acrylic nails and a half-tank of gas. The needle they use to draw blood is a thin, diminutive thing and you have to sit and squeeze a rubber ball to force the blood to pump down your arm and into the passive, anti-war needle. The needle they use for plasma collection is the same needle that shot out of that floating robot probe in the original Star Wars when Darth Vader was trying to get Leia to cough up the location of the rebel base.

You sit in this recliner, right, and a technician comes along to jam this enormous, war-mongering needle into your arm and he tapes it down like he’s roping a calf. And this needle doesn’t hang out and wait nonchalantly for you to ball-pump some blood into its vicinity—this needle physically sucks the blood out of your body. There’s a machine about the size of a refrigerator next to your chair and you can watch, petrified, as your blood slowly leaves your body and rolls through the clear compartments and hoses of this machine. It’s kind of like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, except instead of a chocolate river it’s all your critical fluids, and instead of fizzy floating soda pop it’s all your critical fluids. Just at the point when you start becoming mathematically uncomfortable with the percentage of blood that appears to be ebbing and flowing outside of your skin cocoon, just when you’re on the brink of screaming, “It’s DANTOOINE, alright?!” you hear the machine hiss to a stop. The needle stops sucking, the gears quit turning, and everything slowly reverses direction because NOW all of the red blood cells that were sucked out with the plasma are being shot back into your body. Quickly. So you don’t die. And, hey! There’s an anti-coagulant mixed in there, too! So you don’t die. In fact, the number of vague safety measures in place to meet the “so you don’t die” requirement manages to be both maniacally high and completely subpar at the same time. Sometimes, for example, one of your many plastic hoses full of blood generates an air bubble and your machine starts beeping. It’s a loud beep, an assertive beep, an “I’m Having Serious Issues” beep that causes everyone else to shift in their recliners and stare at you, wide-eyed, because you’re potentially seconds away from a B-movie death. But then a technician saunters over and flicks your rogue hose. Flicks it. Flick! All fixed! I flicked it. You won’t die now. Flick.

Or—and this is a lot of fun—sometimes the needle sucks so ambitiously it actually sucks up the other side of your vein. Then everything goes all to hell. You thought you had problems with the hose; now you’ve got beeping, you’ve got bubbles, the needle’s standing straight up and clicking around like a shop-vac sucking up a bowling ball… It’s a bad scene. Now you get a couple of techs on you, flicking things, reinserting, mopping. When it's all said and done, allowing for assorted close calls, it takes about an hour to get a quart of plasma. An hour’s a long time to sit while most of your blood is three-and-a-half feet away from your brain. A lot of shit can fall down.

But then it’s over and you get thirty bucks. Oh, and sometimes you get to watch a movie or Young and the Restless. Depends who’s on shift. I sold plasma twice a week for about a year, and I probably would have kept doing it (my white ass wasn’t going to light up and tan itself) except that I got really sick. I had a low grade fever all the time and no energy, so I went to my doctor to see if maybe I had mono. I sat in the exam room explaining my symptoms to the nurse, and she nodded and reached over to press her stethoscope to my inner arm. Unfortunately, the track marks that looked like I’d been shooting heroin with a staple gun stopped her cold. I’m not kidding, you could stitch a saddle together with that needle.

“Oh!” I said quickly, knowing how it looked, “No, I sell plasma.”

She blinked at me. “How often do you do that?”

“Twice a week.”

Blink.

“For… like, a year.”

The nurse stood up. Took her gloves off, threw them in the trash.

“Quit doing that,” she said.

So I quit. And surprisingly enough, I felt better. The timing was pretty good, really; I got skin cancer right after that and had seventeen stitches put in my back, so I had to drop off the professional tanning bed circuit. See, when God shuts a door, He really does open a window. Or… when God gives you plasma and you waste it, you get cancer. Wait… when God tells you to sell all your plasma in a dream and then gives you cancer later, at least you finally got your manicotti ass to the gym. Yeah. That one.

 
¶ posted by Erin on Tuesday, June 26, 2007