I finished my day by giving, literally, my third pint of blood since I began this campaign. A few more and I’ll be up to five gallons.<\/p>\n
Yesterday was one of the first times since I’ve begun contributing blood that I didn’t joke with the nurses about how skittish I was at having my blood drawn. You’d think that after forty or fifty times I’d start getting over\u00c2\u00a0this and maybe I’m starting to.<\/p>\n
I blame Mr. Behrends for my giving blood. He was my biology teacher when I was a high school sophomore at Mankato High. A former high school heavy weight wrestler, he might even have been a Minnesota champion, he was a pretty religious fellow and earnest as the day is long. He once told us to be prepared if we ever talked to a committed communist to face some pretty rigorous skepticism about things like Christianity.<\/p>\n
I mostly remember mangling our poor pithed frog when we had disections to do. I was not headed for a surgical career and It was all I could do to prick my finger to put a drop of blood on a slide. The funny thing is that blood and pain don’t really bother me all that much. Its needles inserted into veins that gets me and it has ever since I was a little kid.<\/p>\n
Mr. Beherends told\u00c2\u00a0our class that he felt is was our civic duty to donate blood and his conviction impressed itself on me enough that I gave blood a couple times in college. The first time I almost fainted. I took a break for a number of years after I was first married but my wife got me started again when she made a donation. In good conscience I had to resume as well and the Memorial Blood bank has had me in its sights ever since. It used to be twice a year but recently has become a four times a year “gift.”<\/p>\n
I read recently that some scientists speculate that regular blood donations prolong the life of the donor (as well as the donees). I like the sound of that since I’d like to inflict myself on the world for as long as I possibly can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finished my day by giving, literally, my third pint of blood since I began this campaign. A few more and I’ll be up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}