Things We Are Not Meant To See

Laura stops by to visit after donating platelets. She breezes into my room. I'm always happy to see her, and not just because her platelets do a great job of bumping up my counts. Between her and Mom, I continue to get the best boosts. They would take turns. Mom might start it off, going three or four or five days in a row until she needed a break. Laura would then pick up the baton and run with it for another handful of days. Then Mom again. They did it for weeks, months, whatever. They did it as long as I needed the platelets.

There's usually not much to tell about the whole process. Laura spends a couple of hours at the blood center before driving to the hospital for a quick visit. The platelets arrive shortly after she does. They come by ambulance.

"Hey," she says. "I've got to tell you something. Kinda funny. Kinda gross."

"What's that?"

She laughs, pulls her chair up closer to my bed. "I'm at the blood center, you know, hooked up to the machine."

That's how you get the platelets. I've never actually seen the machine, just heard it described many times before. It's like an arm chair. You're sitting down, one arm extended, needles and tubes. Because you're only there to donate a very specific part of your blood, not whole blood, the tubes lead first to a machine.

It's a "spinning machine." Different components of blood have different weights, different densities. The tube extracts a certain amount of whole blood before it fires up. The spinning causes the blood to separate. There's another tube attached to the machine at the point at which platelets are known to separate, and a small plastic bag slowly is slowly filled. Good news is that you get the rest of your non-platelet blood back.

Once, when Mom was donating platelets, the blood bank hadn't spun off enough of her blood from the platelets. The mix wasn't quite as pure as it could have been, and I ended up having a reaction. Red spots on my arms and legs, an almost immediate rash, a good, high temperature spike. After that, the blood bank took extra care to make sure that the platelets were well-spun.

Blood to machine. Spin. Separate. Blood back to body. More blood to machine. Spin again. Separate again. Return again.

This continues for an hour or so, until the smaller bag has been filled.

"Usually I just read," Laura says. "But I happen to glance at the machine, once, when I turn the pages. There's something different about my blood this time. It's collecting there in the machine and it looks wrong somehow. I ask one of the nurses for help."

"What was it?" I ask.

"Just wait.

"The nurse comes over and looks at my machine. She taps it a couple of times. I'm not sure how to describe it, but there was this additional layer -- some kind of clear liquid -- that I've never seen before.

"'Eat lunch recently?' the nurse asked. 'McDonald's? Burger King?'

"It was Jack in the Box. I was running late for the appointment, so I just grabbed a cheeseburger and rings from the drive through. You know how she knew?"

"Don't tell me."

Laura nods.

"All the fat in my lunch was getting collected, too. It was still in my blood. You should have seen it. All that cheese and grease. It was seriously like the grease jar under the sink, except that this was coming from inside my body."

"Mmm. Tasty. Hope I'm not getting any of that with my platelets later."

She laughs.

"Nope. I got it right back after the platelets were spun out. I asked if they could spin the fat out, too, but they wouldn't, or couldn't, so it's right back inside me."

She shudders, briefly, her whole body shivvering once, like she's really cold, or she's just swallowed a gulp of the wrong drink from the wrong plastic cup at a crowded party, Jagermeister instead of Amstel Light. She sticks out her tongue.

"If I never eat fast food again," she says, "it will be too soon."