View From the Bushes

I work for a laboratory, which also has a donor center. As such, we can donate blood or platelets while on the clock. I generally donate platelets about once a month or so. It takes a little over two hours to donate, so they let you watch a movie (for the curious I watched Anger Management, which I quite enjoyed). Normally it's a pleasant diversion, but today it was quite painful. They started on my left arm and after three really nasty pokes interspersed with phrases like "Oh, looks like I went right through to the other side of that vein..." ending up with a big bubble of blood under the skin, they gave up.

They gave me the choice of stopping right there or switching to the other arm and I was tempted to just call it, but I decided to switch to the other arm, and fortunately the needle went in pretty smoothly. But whereas the first arm was painful at the beginning, the second was painful at the end. For some reason, about an hour and a half in they came and turned the blood pressure cuff up a couple of notches to the point where my arm started cramping up. An hour later, when they finally took the needle out, bending my elbow was simultaneously the most pain and the most relief I had ever experienced. I started to understand why people don't like needles.

I should have been done with this a while ago, but I started watching Nova on PBS, and I was enraptured. It was a two-hour program (and I'm really upset that I missed the first hour) on the voyage of Shackleton to the Antarctic. Holy crap! Like I said, I didn't catch the first hour but the journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia was unbelievable. Checking the TV listings, it looks like it's playing quite a few times over the next week or so. If you get the chance, I definitely recommend it.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross