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.