Blood donation

Monday

Josie Cox

The donor center is the last bastion of civility

“Braiding Sweetgrass,” she cawed from the other side of the room. “By someone named Robin something. Robin Kimmerer, I think.” The source of this unsolicited book recommendation was Sandra, an eighty-six-year-old musician and Quaker. Since the 1960s — Sandra later told me — she’d donated “probably about three hundred pints” of blood. She was such a prolific giver, that when President Nixon proclaimed the first National Blood Donor Month in 1970 — which still is January — she was interviewed on TV. I met Sandra in early January. We were half-sitting, half-lying foot-to-foot in a donor center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

blood

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

Why can’t I give blood?

From our UK edition

I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the nation are scrambled, Westminster’s insane, of course the country’s bleeding out. But at least, I thought, I can help a bit. I’ve given blood in the past and I enjoy it. There’s the feeling of warmth and purpose, and biscuits. I’d never fork out for a packet of custard creams, but like most English women and men I’m a sucker for one or two free on a saucer in a medical setting. Our blood donor scheme is actually all-round cheery. Each country has its own circulatory system, a flow out from the veins of donors, off to hospitals and into patients.