Gloria in Excelsis Dev

"Donate blood in blood bank, not on this road"

As I see it now people can be split in two groups: those who are indifferent, and those who are different. Relative to the ‘give life – give blood’ statement. I’m not sure about their parity but I could bet a finger or two it’s hugely in favour of the group formed by indifferent people.

Thanks to the cry for action of a friend, who had a friend who suffered an almost fatal motorcycle accident, I somehow instantly made up my mind and joined the blood donors group. How do I feel? A bit dizzy, but happy with my decision. And now that I’m familiar with the process I’ll do it again after the legal time of 70 days passed. Of course I’m not fond of needles and the sight of blood summed up with the fear of pain makes me a bit jumpy but let’s please not forget we all have the innate and educable ability to consciously control our thoughts and emotions.

On the other hand I’m quite amazed by the replies to the forwarded message for help. Maybe 80% of recipients totally ignored it. I mean totally. Other 10% had reasonable justifications not to do it at that moment, and the rest said things like: “I don’t support stupid people / adrenaline junkies /  motorcycle freaks”. Of course we agree to disagree and I don’t question their motives. I only think they see only one pixel of the whole picture. It takes days for the blood to be tested and distributed in hospitals. They would have helped the community as a whole, not a certain individual whose decisions in life should be none of our concern. The sooner we change this mentality the better. As the demand for blood is huge, hospitals seem to be asking the relatives of the sick to come up with donors (often even paid for this!) in exchange for the transfusions. I feel this is not the way it should be.

Donating blood should be instilled in our minds and respected as a sign of maturity and a casual social conduct performed at every few months by healthy grown ups, regardless of what one thinks about the morality of a certain receiver. Next time it may be your loved one to need it. Bo-hoo!

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthieu-aubry/521587520/