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jellybaby
ASTTer
You’re there for considerably longer, about 50 minutes in my case. Instead of just being hooked up to a little bag that fills up with blood they attach you to a big machine that takes your blood, strips the plasma out, then returns it to your body. The needle is about the same as standard blood donation. You recover from it quicker, so can donate again after a shorter period than with whole blood and it didn’t knock my training back like giving blood does.
The machine goes through cycles of taking and returning blood, on the return cycles you can get a bit cold and on the taking cycles I had to do similar hand squeezing exercises to standard blood giving to keep my blood pressure up. Other than that it was just a case of settle back and while the time away for me.
They do prefer men and do a couple of tests when you arrive to check it’s safe for you to donate. I can’t quite remember what they were but I think it was BMI and some blood value from a finger prick test.