Every day we look for new experiences in life to learn from and this week was one such week. On Monday morning there was a request from our housing society for an emergency blood donation on Monday 27 Feb '23 at Narayana Hrudayalaya, Bangalore. Since my last blood donation at NH was in early November, it had crossed the mandatory three-month gap before the next donation. I was getting mentally prepared for it.
Narayana Hrudayalaya (estd in 2000) changed its name to Narayana Health in 2013 and has spread all over India and also to Cayman Islands, south of US. Besides getting the top Indian hospital accreditation NABH (click here), the Bangalore cardiac facility and Cayman facility have also been internationally accredited by Joint commission International (JCI)
Had the good oportunity to inetract with top doctors at NH on many different occasions and so I was quite confident of the skill sets of the doctors and healthcare workkers there. I got in touch with the patient's father after going through two people and came to know the real facts. It was an emergency and required me to donate white blood corpuscles, need for granulocytes, which I had not done so far - a process called apheresis granulocytes. I was told I may need to visit the NH blood bank facility multiple times.
The first visit required me to be at NH for tests to check for any infection / ability at my age. Monday afternoon after finishing my morning classes applied for half day leave and I was at the NH blood bank for tests. Being a world-class facility, the quality standards expected were great and testing patients for all sorts of doubtful medical history took about 3 hrs, not much time. Reached back home by 4 pm.
For the second set of procedures at 6 am the next day morning, I was in NH ICU to take the injection, Filgrastim G-CSF, (6 hrs before procedure) to boost the production of WBC by the bone marrow inside the bones. This voluntary WBC apheresis procedure was for a 6 year old male thalassemic patient from Orissa, a kid who was all dark after a heavy chemo treatment.
Reading the Booker Prize winner Dr Sidharth Mukherjee's (Massgen hospital US) book the 600-page magnum opus, The Biography of Cancer in 2012 had given me a better awareness of the history, pain and medical procedures behind cancer treatment and their effectiveness over three millennia across the world.
I am going through another book, read halfway, CANCER WARD by Alexander Solzhenitsyn from Russia, Though he wrote the book that describes the plight of cancer patients in Communist Russia under Stalin around 1955, he was imprisoned for ten years because he exposed the ills in Russian society to the external world. Soon after he was released from prison, he released his next book, Gulag Archipelago. For these two writings, Solzhenitsyn got the coveted 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. To be in the company of late Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a great comfort and talking with him.
On my second visit, Filgrastim 800 mcg injection was administered for inducing white blood cells in the bone marrow. WBC harvesting can happen post administration after a minimum of 6 to 8 hours. WBC is needed in stem cell transplantation. I would be doing the granulocytes apheresis in the seventh floor stem Cell donation centre room.
For the third visit, I was in the NH hospital's 7th-floor stem cell/apheresis special blood collection centre by 2 pm on Tuesday 28 Feb. By 5.30 pm had finished a three-hour voluntary WBC enriched apheresis procedure. 450 ml of WBC with some plasma was taken, as WBC is just 0.5% in blood compared to platelet 51% and plasma about 47 %..
The granulocytes collected was to be transferred within a couple of hrs of collection to the boy having blood cancer in the private ward on floor 5 treating Thalassemia patients. Also, I was told at my age, this is the first and last WBC apheresis. It was indeed a great feeling to be of use to a 6 year old patient, feeling very happy and contented. Just keep doing good to society, till it hurts ..
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| At Narayana Hrudayalaya Stem cell centre |
How great is God, all these blood donations help someone in dire need and selfishly keep me in good health and fit as a fiddle. This is a humble invitation to the spiritual leaders in all our establishments, I hope they would also start showing good example to society and the people by such actions.
So far, starting with the first voluntary blood donation at Trivandrum Govt Medical College Kerala thirty six years back, it's been whole blood donation (WBD) 43, Platelet apheresis 4 and WBC apheresis 1 🙂🙂
I shall once again be ready in 90 days.
An ounce of action is heavier than a tonne of speech - Ralph Waldo Emerson (also attributed to Napolean Bonaparte)
Actions speak louder than words - Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln
George
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