Have you ever donated blood? Today I stepped up into the bloodmobile to give blood for the very first time. BLC was having a Health Fair, and the bloodmobile was parked in the church parking lot. The location couldn’t have been more convenient.

Giving blood is more complicated than I realized. First of all you have to be old enough, tall enough and weigh enough. Needless to say, I qualified on all of those counts. Then you have to not have been exposed to malaria, HIV, mad cow, hepititis, etc. I qualified on those counts too. So I stepped up into the bloodmobile. Once inside you have to provide an ID and be willing to give your social security number. I did that. Then the nurse pricks your finger, and puts just a drop of blood into a little machine that checks your hemoglobin count. Here’s where it fell apart. I needed a reading of 12.5 and only came up with 12.1. Since I was close, she had someone else try a finger on my other hand. 11.9 this time.

So I became a bloodmobile dropout. But the good news was that most people were not like me, and the Red Cross collected 25 units of blood in just a few hours. Thank God for the Red Cross and for the people who donated.

Day 134: 5,736 Steps YTD: 1,235,416 Steps Goal: 1,265,000 Steps