View From the Bushes

So yesterday I'm donating platelets and of course there's this huge questionaire that you have to answer before they will let you donate. Most of the questions relate to AIDS and BSE (mad-cow disease). They've recently streamlined the process and they just have a list of restricted medications. Now I have read the list at least a half a dozen times, but for some reason "insulin" never jumped out at me until yesterday when the person doing the screening said it out loud. It was only then that I made the connection: I had had insulin once when I was in 7th grade. Doctors purposely sent me into insulin shock as part of a treatment for me being ridiculously short (but that's a whole other story by itself).

Finally making the connection I said, 'Yeah I've had insulin, but it was a long, long time ago." She wanted to know if it was beef insulin. How the heck am I supposed to know whether it was beef insulin or not? My suspicion is that it wasn't, and I tell her that, but she want's to know if I'm 100% sure. Of course I'm not 100% sure; it was over 20 years ago. I remind her of that and she says, if you've ever had beef insulin you're permanently deferred. Seeing that this is going to de-rail the whole thing if I don't do something quickly I tell her, "Oh you know what? I just remembered it wasn't insulin after all." She replied, "okay," and we moved on.

The whole thing seems really silly if not downright ridiculous, particularly when you consider that the first case of mad-cow was in 1985 the year after I received insulin. Plus, and of course far more importantly, is it possible that in their slavish adherence to these deferment rules, that rather than saving peoples' lives by keeping BSE-tainted blood out of the supply, that they're killing people because there's not enough blood?

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross