Is Donating Blood A Patriotic Act?
“Hey, Mom? What’s good?” I said.“Well, I’m tired,” she said. “Just came from donating, and oh Lord, it takes a lot out of you.”“Why else, Mitchell? Because I need it,” she said.
Give my mama credit, please, for not getting down with a slouch business. CSL is, depending on whose word you take, either the first or second biggest player in the plasma protein therapies business. And best believe it’s BIG business. I’m talking an annual $4B in 2008 growing to $11B in 2014. CSL Plasma of Boca Raton, Florida, is a division of CSL Behring, a plasma protein biotherapies company out of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. CSL Behring is a member of CSL Limited of Melbourne, Australia.
That same year, Dr. Charles Richard Drew helped set up the first blood collection bank while working as a young resident at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Drew, who would become known as the “Father of the Blood Bank,” and his mentor went on to help launch the pilot program that became the first Red Cross Blood Donor Center of the World War II blood plasma program.
For all her years as America’s harvest, my mama, one of the Americans with little, ain’t never supplied one drop of American blood. She could not. To do so she would have to believe in the principles and guarantees of those Dunlap Broadsides, trust that her home is the center of equal sons and daughters. In order for Mom to bleed American blood, she would have to convince herself that what she calls “priceless” is valued in this great homeland of free and brave.
One proud member of the Old Breed, a Mississippian named Skip, is lying in a field hospital somewhere in the jungles of Guadalcanal with his fatigues cut open and a corpsman working to stanch his gushing gut. Outside the tent flying insects big as mammals, incessant rain, and cracks of lightning. Outside the tent, a gun-storm of Arisaka rifles and Brownings and M1 carbines and Springfields and grenades. Inside the tent, the sacred moans of one of Mississippi Skip’s wounded comrades.
There are countless ways to be bloodletted in this republic, and I pray it doesn’t happen again to Mom in the street, hope too that she’s sold the last parts of her blood to a megacorp. But who knows, maybe one of Mom’s pints spared a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, will aid a wounded Mississippi Skip in Syria. If Mom submits to plasmapheresis again, perhaps her blood parts will treat a burn victim or hemophiliac or kid with HIV.
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