Hi! strategy
This weekend I made a biophysical mistake.
I donated blood about 26 hours after getting my COVID shot. I didn’t break any of the blood donation rules to do it (except my partner would probably say the rule of common sense) but it left me down. for. the. count. Nearly unconscious at the blood bank snack table and then absolutely flattened for a day and a night.
Sometime Monday morning I found the paper that the Blood Bank gave me with my vial barcode number and their follow up rules, which included this: If you feel sick in any way during the three days after you donate (including fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, weakness, fatigue, cough or congestion), call us. I know what this means. This means they want to know if they need to toss out my blood. And I know that my reaction was probably not an infection.
I spent hours agonizing over whether or not to call. Follow their rules and they probably end up tossing my probably perfectly good blood. Ignore their rules and the 10% chance that this was a short-lived virus that put me over the edge (in addition to the vaccine and losing a pint of blood) gets passed on to someone who’s already in distress.
When I’m struggling with a decision, I really do come back to the question: how can I be resilient about this? Which means answering any or all of:
- What’s my goal in the face of this change?
- Who do I mean to be?
My goal? To stop stressing about this decision! I want to be someone who donates blood, but more I want to be someone who donates safe blood. And the people at the blood bank just know more about that than I do. So I decided to… follow the rule. Call them, answer their questions and let them decide what was best.
For a strong person who is usually the decision maker, this was a somewhat counterintuitive choice, and for me it was the right one. Do you ever struggle to put a decision in someone else’s hands? Sometimes, I was reminded in this, it’s the more resilient course.
All my best,
Dr. G
