Spread the Red

Lately, the company that I work with has received a request from the Port Moresby General Hospital asking us for volunteers. PMGH has an ongoing program they call “Spread the Red,” and its aim is to encourage the healthy younger generation to donate blood to assist those who are in need of it. The donated blood will go to PMGH Blood Bank where it undergoes a screening before it gets stored. As blood can only be stored for a certain time, the blood bank team is urging blood donors to donate regularly to prevent a dwindling supply of safe blood.

I guess that with more people stepping up to donate blood, the chance of getting the right blood type prior to transfusion increases and the result of which is more lives saved.

This is the roll-up banner that they put in place to easily let anyone know there’s a bloodletting activity going on. If you notice the Brian Bell logo in the banner, it’s because Brian Bell is an active partner for this project and this particular PMGH drive has been receiving a good funding from the Sir Brian Bell Foundation.

Our staffs took turns donating blood with the blood bank team systematically assisting them. The person wearing a blue shirt is our staff, and his blood pressure is being taken. I’m a bit concerned about the fact that some people are scared of needles. And when someone gets your blood readings while you‘re in the middle of imagining things involving a large hypodermic needle puncturing your skin, you may get really nervous and the readings from the sphygmomanometer can make the examiner think you have hypertension.

On the other hand, I have seen children who cried their hearts out in the mere mention of “injection.”

Our staffs seemed not bothered by an impending pain from the sharp tips of hypodermic needles; perhaps they had become more like responsible adults who were able to trade away the sensation from a stingy injection for an ant bite.

People can actually donate up to 350 ml of blood every three months provided that the donor is somewhere around 18 and 60 years old and not physically malnourished.  Within 24 hours, your body replaces the amount of plasma in your blood that you lost during the donation. In case you’re wondering, the plasma is the clear and watery portion of your blood after some quintessential parts are removed, e.g. platelets or the red blood cells.

In about a month or more, the red cells in your blood will have completely recovered in number. Just to be on the safe side, the blood bank team may not allow you to donate again until at least it’s been eight weeks since your last donation.

The company that I work with has assigned a space appropriate enough for the blood bank team to perform their duties like interviewing the donors and physically checking them up. There’s also an allocated space for our staffs to undergo blood extraction and those purple curtains are up there to give them an adequate sense of privacy.

There are many reasons as to why a patient may need a blood transfusion. For example, if someone has had an injury that resulted to severe bleeding, his or her body may not be able to reproduce enough blood to recover the loss in just a short while, especially if it was excessive. Usually, we can lose about 450 ml of blood without an adverse effect but losing 900 ml of blood may flip a switch to compensate for the loss.

At that rate, our brain will know that there's just not enough blood circulating throughout our body. It will then instruct the heart to increase its heartbeat output in an attempt to restore normal blood flow. But again, 900 ml is just too much of a loss and with not enough blood to pump around, most cells in our body will start losing oxygen. To compensate for the oxygen loss, the subconscious part of our brain will command our breathing mechanism to collect more air by speeding up our breathing pattern. During this time, we may appear to be desperately gasping for air from someone's point of view. 

Since oxygen is carried out by the blood, and in which case, it is the blood that we were lacking of in the first place, there would not be enough blood to transport oxygen around. As a result, blood pressure will decrease below the safe levels. All the cells that don't get an ample supply of oxygen will begin to die off, including the organs that they comprise. The organs will be affected and may fail. For example, if the kidneys fail, the body will stop producing urine and if the brain cells fail, the patient may fall into comma. All of which can be alluded as symptoms of shock from losing about 900 ml of blood.

If we lose about 2,300 ml of blood, which is about 9 cups in layman’s term, we could usually die. This is why it’s important for the blood bank to have as many blood donors as they can get to keep a steady supply of blood so that those in need can be attended to immediately rather than wait up for possible donors.