I've been giving blood for about 10 years now. It was always something I wanted to do and then when Hayley had one of her surgeries she lost a lot of blood. She had given autologous blood donations but it wasn't enough. The doctor told us that he could close up and she could give more blood and he could book another surgery. I knew I couldn't do that to her. And the thing was that if one of your children had an accident and needed blood there would not be any question about using donor blood. Since that time I've felt it especially important to do it. Tonight was the local blood donor clinic. Since I didn't want to go home and then head back into town I asked Jeff to meet me at Shoeless Joe's for dinner and I would go after that.

I walked in the door right behind an old friend, Mary. I often run into Mary at the blood donor clinic but this was the first time that we got there at exactly the same time. She got through the finger pricking stage first and headed off to the 2nd stage, but I was finished the 2nd stage about 2 minutes before her. We laughed about how I beat her. Then at the last stage, the one I call the "bloodletting" I got a very friendly girl who got me set up. But another girl came out and I could here them talking. My girl said, "This girl will take care of you. Take anything she says with a grain of salt" The other girl laughed and replied, " You just dodged a bullet!" All this sort of slowed my bloodletting down a bit. The 2nd girl had a very interesting sarcastic sense of humour and we quickly bonded. Made small talk about the recession, jobs and our children. Then she stuck the needle in my arm. It was absolutely painless and of course I told her so. She replied, "That's what we like to hear! I guess that 25 years of experience has finally paid off!" When I was close to done and just waiting for the bandaid, I looked up towards the snack table and there was Mary smiling smugly and waving! She beat me on the bloodletting. I'll blame it on the girls but it's okay because I did have a pain free experience. Oh yes and I forget to add the other girl returned and asked me if girl 2 had taken good care of me and I told her yes and declared how pain free it was. She then proceeded to tell me that she actually had a guy yesterday tell me that she was the first one to ever actually hurt him. I guess I really did dodge a bullet.