Sounds like a two-needle procedure. Next time ask if you can do single-needle, which only requires one arm. It’ll take longer, but your other arm will be free to turn pages or scratch your nose. Glad it wasn’t such a bummer to dissuade you from donating again!
I asked. They told me no.
For your first time, I assume they did a single donation. If your platelet count is high enough and you’re willing, they might give you the option to do a double or triple next time. A triple might push you toward 3 hours.
At my Red Cross site, they will do one if it’s the only way to get a donation, but it is now strongly discouraged. Five years ago, maybe half the people I saw were single needle. I don’t think I’ve seen any in the last year.
Oh, and kudos for donating @Little_Nemo! It’s a great thing to do.
Sitting still for that long does kind of suck, but I look at it as my forced relaxation. I can watch three hours of shows and not feel guilty.
No big deal. I’ve been donating on a regular basis but it’s always been whole blood donations until now.
Thanks for donating! My husband donated platelets for years, until his cancer diagnosis permanently disqualified him. 
He literally wept after he called the red cross to explain he couldn’t donate any longer.
He watched Netflix during the donations.
One minor fringe benefit: he had to get stem cells collected (in case he needs an autologous stem cell transplant as part of his treatment) and the nurse who did the collection said that only a small fraction of people can do that without getting a central line installed, and that just from looking at his veins, she didn’t think he’d be able to. But due to his successful history of apheresis donations, she said it was worth trying, and in fact, it went smoothly.
I’ve donated platelets around 15 times over the past 20 years, as well as whole blood around 50 times over the past 35 years. I’ve never been asked whether I want to donate plasma at the same time as platelets. Maybe that’s because I’m small, 5’3" and 120 lbs when I started donating, 132 lbs now.
In fact, the last time I donated platelets, last year, they told me at first that it would take 90 minutes, but then the machine readout said that it was going too fast to be safe for me and they needed to slow it down to 2 hours.
The older I get, the more drained I feel after a donation. It’s physically uncomfortable too, not just the sitting still (they did single needle, so I caught up on texts and emails) but also I get the shakes and cramps in my legs and tingling in my face. Taking Tums helps, but this time they gave me 8 and said that I needed to ration them out over the 2 hours, which somehow felt uncertain and emotionally uncomfortable as well.
I was even thinking about not donating platelets any more, but a relative is having a rough time with lymphoma, and he and his wife said that it was a real morale booster to hear that I was donating with him in mind.
@puzzlegal that’s sad about your husband no longer being able to donate. I hope that his cancer treatment is going well.
Way to go @Little_Nemo ! I started out with whole blood before I started doing platelets about 8-9 years ago.
I’ve only done single needle once. It takes more time, and for a lot of people, their veins “give out” part way through the process and the apheresis machine sometimes can’t push any blood into the body. That happened with my donation, and while they still did get three units, they wanted me to sit in the canteen a while longer and get some more fluids in me than usual. (I have an extremely reliable vein in one arm but several squirrely veins in the other - it would be much easier on the phlebotomists if they could only use the one arm.)
I find watching TV shows on Netflix to be a good use of the time in the chair - they fill up the time better than movies, where you’ll often have extra time after one ends. Sometimes I’ll watch a movie then have enough time left for a single TV episode, or something really short like Love Death & Robots.
They always weigh me when they ask about platelets + plasma, so I assume this is the case. I weigh about twice what you do, so I’ve never had trouble with the concurrent donation.
That’s too bad. If my local blood bank said I had to go back to a two-needle procedure, I’d probably stop donating. I know it’s all in my head, but my nose or scalp always started to itch as soon as my second arm was immobilized.
Yes, thanks. He’s in remission, and currently doing very well. Myeloma isn’t considered to be curable, and the expectation is that it will eventually come back. But his oncologist was talking about choices over decades, and the treatments keep getting better.
Now I’ve encountered the other unforeseen downside.
When I was giving whole blood donations, I would go weeks without getting calls asking me to schedule another donation.
Now that I’m on the plasma/platelet list, the interval has been significantly reduced. I donated last Friday and I’m already getting calls asking me to sign up again.
I may have to explore the option of going on a “do not call” list.
Can you either schedule online? Can you schedule your next donation before you leave? That way they (probably) won’t cold call you.
Hah, I’ve had the same experience and totally relate. I really should ask them not to call, but they’re so nice about it that I feel bad, like I’m rejecting them. Instead I’ve gotten in the habit of always having one scheduled after my donation like ricepad says, and the calls stopped.
Last visit, the phlebotomist mentioned that her script said to “ask the donor to schedule their next appointment” but she had a note in my file that I always schedule on my own, so she wasn’t going to ask me.
Yesterday I did another donation, and it turns out that I’ve been doing concurrent (platelets and plasma) donations all along! I now realize they’ve been telling me I was doing both, but for some reason it never resonated with me that I was donating two different blood components. The only time I’ve not done concurrent donations is the few times my interval was shorter than 28 days, in which it was platelets only.
Our local blood bank just announced that they’re giving out tickets for our local MLB team to anyone who donates this week, so I looked up my donor records. Two of my platelet donations from years back also included Red Blood Cell donations.
@puzzlegal good to hear about the improvement in Myeloma treatments.
@Vlad_Igor it would be interesting to hear your story of saving a life while at the blood bank!
Ok. The war story:
I was assigned to the Blood Bank one evening shift, and it had been quiet. In the late afternoon, suddenly a nurse from the ED appears at the dispensing door (a dutch door with a platform) asking for two O negative units. We have a protocol for dispensing unmatched units, so I followed that and asked politely for a properly drawn and labeled blood tube for the type and crossmatch*. Right behind her was another nurse asking for our last two O neg units, and I knew something was up. I quickly called our Red Cross blood depot 70 miles away and asked for a rush shipment of four O neg units. As soon as I got off the phone with the ARC, another nurse appears at the window and asks for more units. My shift supervisor, Edmund, walks in and I tell him what I did and his eyes bug out. The nurse is demanding blood right now, no testing. So, for the next hour, nurses were running up and down three flights of stairs from the OR to the Blood Bank. We dispensed our entire O pos and A pos units straight from the cooler to the nurses’ hands and were about to switch to B pos when the ARC showed up with more units (we had called again to add on to our order).
Little by little, we learned what had happened: a teenage driver had been t-boned at an icy intersection and her kidney and spleen had been lacerated. Major arteries had been cut, and the nurses were literally squeezing the blood bags into large-bore lines in her arms to keep her blood pressure up as the surgeon worked on stopping the bleeding. The surgeon later said he could hear the blood trickling out as he worked on her injuries. We and the OR staff were breaking all sorts of FDA rules by not testing units, cross-checking the unit ID and type, and the patient’s ID and type. In all, we dispensed 21 units of red cells, 6 units of fresh-frozen plasma, and 1 pool of 6 platelet bags. We replaced her entire blood volume twice. She survived the surgery minus a kidney, and spleen (I think), and we and the OR staff spent another three hours “cleaning up” by documenting what units were dispensed and when, and performing after-the-fact type and crossmatching. I was cruising on high adrenaline most of the shift.
It turned out that the patient was originally O neg, and because we gave her so much Rh positive blood, she needed a massive dose of RhoGam** by IM injection. I found her years later on social media and shared my experience with her. She was grateful for the hospital staff’s effort and was living a good life, but no children***. This was an example of how donated red cells, plasma, and platelets helped us save a life. The drama this time was real, and not hyperbole.
*A type is performed by mixing the patient’s red cells with ABO and Rh antiserum, and their serum with known ABO and Rh red cells, to determine their blood type. A crossmatch is when you mix the patient’s serum with donor red cells to check for ABO incompatibility, and the patient serum mixed with a three-sample assortment of red cells to look for antibodies against red cells.
** RhoGam is a solution of anti-Rh antibodies given to women who are Rh negative and have given birth to Rh positive babies. The Rhogam antibodies attach to any Rh positive red cells and “hide” them from the Rh negative mother’s immune system. It has greatly reduced the incidence of hydrops fetalis, where a second pregnancy with an Rh positive fetus is threatened because the mother’s anti-Rh anibodies produced from the first Rh positive fetus attack the second Rh positive fetus.
*** She would have been at significant risk for miscarriage, because regardless of how much Rhogam she had been given, she would likely have had anti-Rh antibodies circulating in her blood from all of the Rh positive blood we gave her.
Great story! Interesting that you were able to find her later and see that she was living a good life.
My mother-in-law had 4 miscarriages in the 1950s because of Rh incompatibility, before RhoGam was developed.