If it Bleeds, we can PAY it...

I had an interesting experience this morning on my way to work. Many of you may know, that I donate my blood plasma one to two times a week, for a little extra money to help pay the bills. I started doing this when I was a poor NBC Page trying to survive in the expensive city that is Los Angeles. The process is a pretty simple one. I show up, sit down, they stick a I.V.-looking needle in my arm, and a machine pumps out my blood. It then separates the plasma from the red blood cells and returns the red blood cells to my body and stores the plasma in a plastic bottle. And they pay me for that. It might sound kind of gruesome, but it is actually VERY easy.

Now you're probably wondering what Blood Plasma is exactly? It is the liquid component of blood, in which the blood cells are suspended. It makes up about 55% of total blood volume and let me tell you, it is valuable too. If our bodies had anything in it that could be compared to gold, plasma is it. They pay me $75 dollars a visit, and I can go up to twice a week. So I can potentially pull in about $150 a week for doing nothing.

Anyway, with that explanation out of the way, let me get to my experience. After my plasma appointment today, as usual, they wrapped up my right elbow with gauss and tape and sent me on my way. As I was driving to work, I felt an unusual sensation on my right arm. I looked down and my elbow was covered in blood. The strange sensation I was feeling was the warm, sticky fluid oozing out and running down the length of my forearm. My initial reaction was panic (but that was only because I didn't want to get any on my white shirt), but after further investigation, I found that whatever was bleeding had stopped. It didn't help that I noticed all this while I was driving on a busy LA highway, in heavy traffic to boot. Thankfully, I have suffered several horrendous injuries in my life time, so I am not weakened at the sight of blood and this experience was not traumatic, just more of an inconvenience. The bleeding had stopped long before I noticed my arm, so bleeding to death was not the concern, keeping the life-sustaining-fluid off my clothing was. Apparently fortune was smiling upon me today, for I did not get one single drop of blood on my nice white shirt. After all, the last thing I want to do is show up to work looking like I just gutted a cow (for you Megan). I did however learn a valuable lesson today, don't bleed and drive. It's too distracting to focus on the road.

You can see a bandage covering the spot on my elbow that was the source of my little episode.