My First Blood Donation..

Dr D.Y. Patil Medical College had organised a Blood Donation camp in my college today. I thanked my good sense for not having antibiotics since the past 3 days despite my cough, else I would not have been eligible for the donation. Blood donation had been on my agenda since the time I understood the very concept of it. Its fascinating to lend a flow of life into somebody else's body.

Most of my friends had been disqualified for the donation. The various reasons for it were:

• Intake of paracetamol in the past 3 days
• Intake of antibiotics for the past 3 days
• Intake of alcohol in the past 3 days
• Hospitalization due to malaria/ typhoid/ jaundice in the past 6 months

As a result they flocked around me and video-taped the entire event, finding nothing better to kill their time with. Their investment was rewarded when about fifteen minutes after the donation, I started feeling, and acting funny. I guess that is how getting drunk must feel. I couldn't stop laughing, couldn't put one foot after the other without wobbling and felt the world spinning with every turn of my head.

Anyway.. now that I am back to my senses and seem to have regenerated the 350 ml of blood that I had donated, I feel something very happy inside me. Probably it's because I did something which I had wanted to experience since so long. Probably because I had glorified the idea of donating blood in my mind too much. So many people do it.. And they do it so regularly.. And it's probably not that big a deal.. But for me it satisfied something inside me immensely. "Doing Something For Others" is a huge notion and I don't think I have ever acted upon it consciously, not even as a beginner. Donating blood might have been a simple way... one of the millions... of Social Work. It gives a strange feeling to realize that the blood taken out from my body will be transfused into that of a stranger's... And I'll never come to know who's the one with whom I have shared a piece of my heart with.

SHE