Have you tried donating your blood?

Today, my story is about my recent blood donation experience and how you, too, can get the benefits I am getting from this experience.

A bit of Bloodletting history first..

Did you know that in ancient time this procedure was the doctor's first-line of treatment (and even the barber..weird) in dealing with your ill body?

Yes, bloodletting is necessary for someone that has imbalance bodily fluids - either lack or have excessive fluids. What are these fluids? They call it humors and most frequently, this is how people in olden time view the cause of human illnesses.

It was thought then, that in order for someone to recover from illness, the abundance of fluids in human body must be lessen. Often times the doctors suspected that the blood is excessive among the other types of humors.

Let's see first what the four major bodily fluids or humors are:

These are - blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.

viewed in ancient time	viewed today
blood	unclotted erythrocytes
phlegm	white blood cells
black bile	dark clot
yellow bile	clear yellow serum

To cut the story short, in the turn of 19th century, the practice of bloodletting to treat several human illnesses was abandoned and called a pseudoscience.

Let me continue now my bloodletting experience:

Have you heard the "change oil" procedure when your car reaches a certain mileage and your car maintenance book prompts you to go to your maintenance shop? Yes! That is same principle - change your oil!

Human body is like a car and giving a blood is like removing worn-out engine oil.

Enough with a long prelude!

I'm sure your workplace has health programs such as the bloodletting or blood drives. I help organize the bloodletting activities in our company and we do it twice a year in four different locations of our offices.

We usually ask the service of St. Luke's to conduct bloodletting for our company and every year they invite us to receive the plaque of appreciation for the honor for being a regular blood donor company.

Simple steps to follow when you want to donate a blood.

First, fill-up the form.

It will ask you a few personal information with regards to what you did and bodily intake for the past few days.

After the doctor was done with his/her validation of the contents and finish taking your blood pressure (BP) and weight, you are good to go.

But first they will take a blood sample to know your blood type.

Here is the exciting part!

^{Blood extraction or bloodletting!!}

^{If I remember it correctly, they only need 450cc of blood from you. This is to avoid the sense of ill effect or getting dizzy and weakness.}

^{You might ask, after the bloodletting do I still have enough blood in my body? Yes, of course. Drawing out your blood will stimulate our bone marrow to produce new blood cells. So yes, the blood that was taken out from you will quickly be replaced such as the idea of "changing the oil".}

What did I get after donating my blood?

Last year and the year before that I received a first aid kit as a freebie. This year I received a multi-retractable cellphone charger kit plus mirienda to get me back on my feet. To add to that, all blood donors will get Blood Donor I.D. so when the time comes that you and your love ones need blood, you can use this card and receive your bags of blood.

All in all, I felt the whole experience somehow recharged me. No dizziness, I was not weak, and felt the new "changed oil" feeling.

Philippine Red Cross (PRC) once had a theme - "every blood donation is a gift of life"

---

While PRC Chairman Dick Gordon said, "blood donors play a key role in having an adequate blood supply for those in need of transfusion."

---

Finally, PRC Governor, Rosa Rosal said, "No Filipino should die due to lack of blood. Blood donors are all heroes of this generation".

Thank you for reading my post.

---

Reference:
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

3.http://www.history.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bloodletting

4.https://www.redcross.org.ph/press/news/prc-to-acclaim-voluntary-blood-donors

---

Thanks to @bearone for graciously giving me my @steemph footer for free.

And also to @aalagenesis for this personalized calligraphy footer.