How did she find out? In the US there is HIPAA and I imagine other countries have similar laws, even without laws like that shouldn’t it be difficult to find that stuff out?
A lot of countries keep track of this information. For example, I can’t remember the country but when your blood is used you’re sent a message saying you helped save a life
you can ask for a more experienced phlebotomist. If you are young and healthy they will often assign newer ones to draw your blood because it’s how they get good, instead of working on like, old wrinkly people.
Its definitely getting worse. I've donated to non-profits 56 times so far since I was 18 because I'm O- and feel obligated since it can help so many people (plus I can just pick up a 6 pack of cheap beer and get fucked up for like 9 bucks) and I definitely think the experience has become more unwelcoming and mechanical over the years
I've donated to non-profits 56 times so far since I was 18 because I'm O-
Wow, that's excellent! Sincerely, 56 pints of O- is saving lots of lives!
I definitely think the experience has become more unwelcoming and mechanical over the years
I donated to the Red Cross for years, until I had a monumentally crappy donation experience. After that I started donating at the children's hospital. The people there are so nice! It seems like they must select for that. "Have you noticed how sweet and pleasant Judy is? We should ask her if she will join the blood donation unit."
Agreed 100%. "What gets recognized gets repeated." Adults have a lot of bad days, getting random text telling me I helped saved a life would not just give me a much needed boost but also likely to schedule m next donation.
There's something very endearing and intriguing about this concept- just getting an uplifting text from some anonymous person at random times to put a smile on your face.
No further messages or back-n-forth conversation, but just one quick message to brighten your day.
I have donated 10 gallons. At the donation center, they tell you that a pint of blood can save 3 lives. That seems like bullshit to me. I don't know the actual number, but I like to assume the inverse, that 3 pints saves 1 life. At that rate, 10 gallons is about 27 lives. Even if the reality is only 20 lives, that's still pretty cool, right?
I'm not a particularly saintly person. I donated a lot when I was living in a town that had a Red Cross blood donation setup every Thursday night at the Kiwanis club. After donating, while we were eating snacks and drinking juice to restore our blood sugar, at the table where we sat was the sign-up sheet for the next time we could donate, 6 weeks in the future. So we signed up whenever we donated! They would call to remind us the Wednesday before. It was super-easy to donate 8 times per year => 1 gallon.
I always wonder why they don't have donation centers at the mall, open all the time.
Joe: I need to buy some clothes and stuff, I'll be ready to go in an hour.
Moe: OK, I'll go donate blood. Meet you in an hour!
A healthier heart and vascular system
Regular blood donation is linked to lower blood pressure and a lower risk for heart attacks. “It definitely helps to reduce cardiovascular risk factors,” says DeSimone.
What’s the connection? “If your hemoglobin is too high, blood donation helps to lower the viscosity of the blood, which has been associated with the formation of blood clots, heart attacks, and stroke,” DeSimone says. “Interestingly, these benefits are more significant in men compared to women. We think maybe it’s because women have menstrual cycles, so they do it naturally without donating blood.”
There's a joke lurking there, somewhere. "Donating blood puts the men in menstruation." Someone funnier than me will discover the joke someday.
The American Red Cross uses the "Save three lives" line and has kind of been moving away from it. They often now say "lives impacted" which feels more accurate. A whole blood donation is typically separated into its three components, red blood, plasma, and platelets, which is where the "three" comes from. One donation can be transfused into three different people.
They recently found that donating blood removes PFOA "forever chemicals" from your body. Sure, they are going into the recipient, but I guess that's not your problem
By that logic doing literally anything for anyone is lifesaving.
Oh you paid your employees so now they can afford to eat? Congrats. You're a lifesaver.
Let's not pretend that the average donor thinks this message means anything other than their blood was used to directly save a person who was bleeding acutely.
You don't have to be so negative. While it is deceptive and not as life saving as it seems, it still helps prevent death. It's going to be a net positive even if used for cosmetic surgery.
I'm not even sure if the messages they receive specify that it saved a life, or if it was just "used".
This is such a simple thing, but giving feedback like this, that your actions helped someone, not only show you that your actions had a point, but through that also make you feel good.
People want to be altruistic, and I think most donate blood with the intent of helping others. But that doesn't mean they can't some positive reinforcement anyway. Good human.
They mix small portions of donor blood to do batch testing. They'll mix like five test tubes together and run the test. If it comes up negative, they saved the cost of four tests. If it comes up positive, they know they need to test each of the five individually.
Whole blood donations are often divided into their components and as the platelet portion is so small they combine it with other donors to get a full unit. I've heard it takes up to 10 whole blood donations to get a single unit of platelets
According to the article I found, once she got curious she called and pestered the hospitals until a nurse told her the surname. It was his, but still common. She recited her husband's "identification number" "instinctively," and the nurse asked, "How did you know?"
So they didn't want to tell her, but they also aren't strict enough about it to stand up to a pest.
I donate a lot of blood, and the more desperate a recipient is to get my name, the less I'd want them to have it. There is no way I'd want my name given to a woman calling all the hospitals trying to pester people into revealing private information like that.
There is a hospital group that displays a QR code on the blood bags. If the recipient chooses, they can scan the code and send an anonymous message and/or picture to the donor. That's about as far as I think it should go.
it'd be highly amusing if "how did you know?" was just their way of getting her to stop calling. the same way you deal with children who won't leave you alone.
I don't know how it works in her country, but in mine we can't choose who we want to donate blood and organs to. Thus, when someone needs blood, it is common to ask people close to them to donate, thus increasing blood banks, making the queue move faster and increasing the chance of finding a donor.
So what happens is that your donor is very likely to be someone you know or have heard of people asking for donations.
What, you're not familiar with all niche, industry and job specific acronyms? I swear reddit is the worst for hiding information crucial to understand what the comment is actually saying behind acronyms they invented as kids in their tree house club with their stuffed tiger pal
People have full rights to their medical records, including the donor’s name? No way. It is unbelievable to me that a donor wouldn’t have the right to privacy. The donor number may be in the chart, but it would be a serious ethics violation for their name to be (and available in the patient-accessible records) if this is really what’s happening.
I think most people agree that an expectation of privacy is reasonable. A patient does not need to know your name to get your blood. When they agree to blood, they agree to get it from an anonymous source (with appropriate testing and handling/storage, of course).
Yeah, I got a transfusion for a bad arm break + surgery. There's no way for me to find out who donated their blood to me. I'm sure it's tracked but I doubt the hospital would tell me.
Not exactly. Each unit of blood comes from an individual donor. If more than one blood product is transfused, they will generally be from different donors.
They’ve been married for more than 10 years, she was just unconscious when he brought her to the hospital after a car accident.
She needed a blood transfusion and the hospital was short on her blood type but her husband was a perfect donor.
She lived but they didn’t have insurance and the medical bills drowned them in debt. When she was better she went through and they worked on a plan to pay it off. Her husband worked three jobs because his wife wasn’t strong enough work after her accident, although she worked odd jobs, tutored and did what she could to make ends meet. He got home early one day and overhead her arguing with the hospital medical biller on all the fees from the accident 10 years ago. She had tried to dispute and haggle each fee from the itemized bill in hopes of negotiating it lower. She was inquiring about the number of units of blood charged and how come it added up to so much? When she was younger she used to donate blood, so all those volunteers, they donate for free?
Her husband heard her and was like oh yeah, that day the hospital was short blood so they used mine, so there shouldn’t be a $1,500 charge? And that’s how she found out it was her husband that donated blood that saved her 11 years ago. The hospital agreed later after more arguing to reduce the charge to just $1,000 for the cost of materials and labor for doing the blood transfusion.
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u/Mispeled_Divel 15d ago
How did she find out? In the US there is HIPAA and I imagine other countries have similar laws, even without laws like that shouldn’t it be difficult to find that stuff out?