Blood and Therapy

Today, because I am a socially responsible citizen and not an IV drug user (not that there is anything wrong with being an IV drug user, apart from the obvious of course, but the blood bank doesn't seem to agree) I gave blood. After all the faffing around with forms and haemoglobin testing and so forth I finally got around to giving blood. The actual blood-related part took about 10 or 15 minutes in total, during which time I had a bit of a chat with the nurse who was doing the taking of blood, and in that time she told me that she had recently had an operation to have a cyst removed, that she had cancer some number of years ago, that she doesn't like her mother in law (who was scornful of the amount of time she spent recuperating back then because it was only "a little bit of cancer"), that she has really bad anxiety attacks occasionally, that she is seeing a therapist in order to deal with these anxiety attacks (and at these therapy sessions she also talks a lot about not liking her mother in law), and she also implied that she (the nurse) regrets never having had children of her own. Plus we also managed a bit about the weather, about Switzerland, about the process of blood donation in Switzerland (which was brief because neither of us knew anything about it), and about her brother who lives in some crazy foreign country with his crazy foreign partner.

My friend who I had dinner with later said that she thinks people like to take me into their confidence, but I think the woman might just have been fond of inappropriate sharing of information.

Incidentally, I was given a pen as a reward or something because I have apparently donated blood or plasma 25 times, and also I discovered that my blood pressure is lower than normal (not a good thing in my opinion) and my haemoglobin level is also a bit useless. Part of the reason I wanted to give blood was so that I would find out that my haemoglobin was super (and then feel smug about it) since I haven't donated blood for ages and since I have been a bit of a meat-eater lately in Switzy, but alas, that little happiness was denied me. Sigh.