It's been a tough couple of months in Blood Bank of Delmarva exile. My Hb dropped below their 13 g/dl threshold two months ago, far enough under to not be borderline and confirmed by the lab. Search for blood loss via stool testing and colonoscopy was unrevealing. My eGFR had dropped gradually to 55 which assigns me CKD 3a but, which the gastroenterologist attributes the minor anemia, though I think the creatinine has been stable a while and the reduction seemed a little precipitous since the Hb measured 13.5 when I had my appendix out a year and a half earlier and had been rather stable at just about 13 on blood bank screening as recently as a couple of months earlier. Sit tight two months. Repeat Hb 12.9 which restores me to recent baseline. Back to the Blood Bank to give more platelets. I passed, with the desktop Hb at 14.0, which is probably just as wrong as the low ones, but an uneventful extraction of blood with return of the RBCs. Thought they were having a cap promotion for donors, but nobody offered me a Kewpie doll of any type. What I wanted I got, some reassurance that health decline was not inexorable and the ability to be useful to somebody I didn't know without any expectation of anything in return.
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