Plasmapheresis Thoughts from the White Board - May 29

That's a fancy word for donating plasma, or something like that.  My lifetime record for doing so is now three times.  By the time you read this post, it may be four.  I am debating about going again this morning.

It's been interesting so far.  My first time was not so great.  The long wait and the same dumb questions over and over were bad enough, but no worse than some doctor office visits I've had.  The bad part was that I had it in my head that donating plasma was like going to a doctor's office to do blood work - i.e.: no eating beforehand.  So on my first visit, they sent me out to eat something, as I hadn't had food since I'd gotten home the night before from work.

Well, I went and had an apple and a granola bar of some sort, but it wasn't enough.  I got very light-headed and almost passed out after a couple of cycles of my blood went through the machine.  They said I turned white as a sheet.  I felt it.  The experience was not one I'd willingly repeat.

The second visit went better, but I still got pretty drained (no pun intended).  By the end, I felt really washed out.  Thankfully, they'd run the machine at a slower pace than usual.  It helped me not to feel quite so queasy.

You know, it's surprisingly difficult to find humorous images of plasma donation.  So I went with this one, which isn't all that funny after I got the idea of a mosquito sitting on my exposed arm, sucking the red stuff out of my tender flesh...  Full body creep, that does. / Source: WellSphere.com

Last Friday was my third trip.  I let them go full speed on the thing that time, and it was a bit painful.  After the blood went out and came back in a couple of times over, the needle started to vibrate in my arm on intermittent occasions.  Always during the draw part.  At the end, the tech lady said it was a pressure thing and perfectly normal.  But having a needle that big stuck in your vein and then vibrating around unexpectedly is not my idea of "perfectly normal."  More like perfectly aggravating and briefly quite painful

I'll definitely keep it up; this plasma donating thing.  Part of the money from that last needle-vibrating visit went toward my wife getting to go see Star Trek: Into Darkness with her mom.  Money is tight, and so the extra income is helpful.

Ah, speaking of blood, as mentioned in my last post, I finished watching the final episode of the entire series of The Sopranos last evening.  The end was quite surprising.  I suppose, based on my impression of it ("what the bleep! - oh, I gotta look that up on the 'net"), a lot of people had the same reaction.

For those who don't know, a very short primer.  The Sopranos is an HBO original production from the late 1990s and through the mid 2000s, which chronicles the life of up-and-coming mobster Tony Soprano of the New Jersey outfit.  Just to state the obvious, since it is a cable program, it contains plenty of "R" rated material.  In some of the episodes, I almost made a game out of counting the number of times the camera lingers on the topless strippers in the mafioso's club, called the "Bada Bing."  Seriously kids, it's pretty gratuitous.

The violence is just as bad.  Lots of bloody and gory shootings and other pain and injury sort of stuff like that.  Early on, I got a bit uncomfortable with the material, but unfortunately, I suppose I became desensitized over time.  The plot kept me interested.  It's very involved stuff.

Anyway, those who know the show will know what I mean about the very end.  Tony has survived a major mob war with one of the Five Families of New York, and the boss of that family has been taken out.  Things aren't particularly any better than usual, but for a moment, our lead character and his somewhat dysfunctional family are taking a breather and meeting to have a meal in a diner.

Now I had tried to keep the end a secret from myself, so as not to spoil it.  But based on something I inadvertently read, I expected they'd take the dream sequence motif that the show riffs on regularly and notch it up.  That is, that Tony would get killed before the last episode or in the early moments of the last episode, and the last show would be about him being in hell.  A really bad dream sequence, you know?  I mean, we become quite sympathetic toward Tony at times, and he isn't all bad, but in the end, he's still a bad guy.  He does things that no sensible person should.  He's a sociopath, plain and simple.  But even sociopaths are people, ya know?  That's what makes it interesting, I suppose.


This is a pretty accurate representation of the scene from The Sopranos, though the humor of it misses me.  I guess you had to be there.  The best part is the guy who represents the "shooter" in the original is the actor who played one of the bosses of the New York Five Families groups that Tony was warring with.  Well, it's complicated, and I'm not explaining myself well.  Go to this website if you want to know more about the "Made In America" final moments theory on Tony getting shot.

But instead, the creators decided to do something different and leave the show on an ambiguous note.  The impression, when followed carefully, is that Tony is shot in the head while sitting in the booth with 2/3rd of his immediate family.  His daughter walks in to the diner and she is possibly the last thing Tony sees, but we don't really see that.  The last five to ten seconds of the show, before the credits roll, are completely blank screen and quiet.  The prevailing idea, based on what I read after saying "what the bleep," is that this represents a theme touched on by one of Tony's lieutenants in a previous episode.  That is, you don't hear your death coming.  You're just there one moment, and then dead the next.  Of course, I'm a solid believer in "waking up" on the other side, so to speak.  But the idea of going from living to complete blackness of death was quite heavy.  Very well executed, for what they were trying to say.

The whole show was pretty well done, though at times I was annoyed by seemingly pointless moments of either excessive violence or sex, or the silly episodes that seem to be preaching on Italian-American discrimination or this or that.  There were some that I could just as easily skip.  Then again, when Tony's sister Janice shoots her boyfriend Ritchie Aprilo (I'm not looking up the spelling on his last name, sorry) in a moment of blind stunned reactionary anger after he hits her and talks to her like a cheap whore?  Whoa.  Didn't see that whole "shooting him thing" coming.

The only conveniently at-hand photo of our new kitten "Scout," who is currently (as I write this) literally in the dog house because she woke my wife up out of a sound sleep.  / Source: Facebook.com

Anyway...  What else?  I'll need to post a photo of the new kitten one of these first days.  "Scout" has taken quite a liking to me.  The darn thing follows me around and snuggles up to me when I sit down for very long.  And I didn't even want another cat.  I miss my wife's cat George, but he's been dead for a few years now.  Old age.  But boy, that was a smart cat.  And very affectionate.  And not crazy.  I'm no cat hater by any means, but they do get on my nerves when they do that crazy cat-thing.  You know, run around, peer out at you from under the darkest corners of end tables, pounce on your unsuspecting feet as you stumble to the bathroom after having fallen asleep on the sofa after watching an episode of The Sopranos after getting home from work late one night...  That sort of thing.

The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths. - Ken Kesey

 Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed. - Albert Einstein

Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. - Cormac McCarthy

 The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: sudden death. - Dr. Michael Phelps

The parting comment:

Source: LolSnaps.com

 Two good pieces of advice if I ever heard it.