Bleeding heart

I gave blood the other day, I am a regular blood donor and have been since I was a student nurse.My blood group is A negative. The nurse at the blood bank asked me if I had thought about donating my plasma. I looked at her quite puzzled and said don't you already take that from the blood?

Well yes they do, but there is another issue, When you donate blood they take about 470mls of whole blood which has plasma, red and white cells, platelets and they use the various components for a variety of purposes, so the total volume of plasma they get to use is really quite a small amount.

The other issue for me is that my blood type is only about 8% of the population so my red blood cells are not always that useful but if I just donated plasma they could get a much bigger volume which is of more use. Here's a link to the blood bank info http://www.donateblood.com.au/learn/apheresis.

So the great thing is that you can donate every 2 - 3 weeks as your own red cells are returned to you so you don't have to wait for the body to make more red cells. http://www.donateblood.com.au/learn#

So I've been booked in to donate plasma in a couple of weeks I'll let you know how that goes, but maybe if you haven't thought about it maybe you could be a blood donor?