101 in 1001: 013 donate platelets at least 12 times [05/12 as of 11.14.06]
weird factoid of the day, courtesy of my ongoing haunting of the citicorp blood center: apparently hemoglobin levels on the left and right sides of the body, a la foot sizes, don't always match up. i flunked the test when a tech pricked my right hand last night (12.4 g/dl), which usually means that i haven't been a very good vegetarian and get booted from the donation queue. this tech, however, went right on to my left hand, saying that the reading was so close that the occasional slight variation between sides could get me above the 12.5 minimum to fork over the platelets. and how - my reading on that side was 14.0, which is significantly higher than it's ever been. i've been paging through blood journals for the why and wherefore of this, but no luck thus far; in the interim, i've declared myself a superhero and have adopted a nick cave theme song.
You're one microscopic cog
in her catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
her left iron hand
excellent.
5 comments:
Perhaps it is linked to your right/lefthandedness. (That is the worst word ever. Sorry.)
Take a look at your thumbs, putting the fleshy bit of your palms (directly below the thumbs) squarely together. One thumb is, oftentimes, longer than the other. Me, my left thumb is longer than the right, quite significantly. And I happen to be a lefty.
But maybe that's because I have written with my left hand for two decades, and thus have given my left hand more work to do. So I probably have solved precisely nothing.
Sorry. Again.
off-topic: my mother contends that i'm not a "real left-handed person" because i sucked my right thumb as a wee one, and that's (according to her) the only reason i started writing with my left. not that these things happened at the same time, mind you.
you could be right about the -handedness coming into play, though i'd always heard of it in the context of comparative size/strength. never...circulatory fortitude*? my thumbs, incidentally, are the same length (though the left is a bit uglier).
the irony here is that they ran the apheresis lines from my right arm anyway.
*a phrase i intend to add to the next version of my resume.
ah, left-handedness. megan always delights in showing me research on the poor outcomes for us poor sinistrels - early death, developmental delays, immune system deficiencies. contra lauren, as a child i was extremely left-handed - when someone tested me by placing an object near my right hand and asked me to pick it up, i reached over with my left hand. she (the director of my preschool) recommended i become involved in sports to improve my coordination.
also, i recall also sucking my right thumb (and to an embarassing age. but that's another story). to me, this makes sense, as it allowed me to have my left hand free to scribble, catch something thrown at me, fend off attacks, etc.
i am right-handed.
-however-
by tom, my left thumb is longer than my right.
(thinking myself mistaken, i've re-measured 3 times now similar results. all i can think of is how i always wanted to be left-handed, and that this is the only manifestation which worked itself out of that desire.)
re: fending off attacks, megan's stats: i think we all know that lefty tribulation can be traced back to punk-ass dextral haters. i made a point of switching over in order to use the right-handed, red-handled scissors in kindergarten because i could never find any of the damn green-handled ones. the trauma was life-shortening.
note the edit to my comment above: the thumb thing is ma's theory. i could as easily have sucked my right thumb, as jacob did, because i was going to be left-handed.
righties tend to quote those stats, my personal theory goes, because a lot of lefties (myself included) seem disproportionately proud of themselves for being (sort of) rare. it makes no sense, but man is it fun.
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