#crossposts

Content Warning: This post contains numerous references to needles and blood.

Sometimes in our stories, our characters are going to need to give blood. Whether it’s to help an injured family member or a wounded comrade, one of the ways your characters can show their heroism is by giving of themselves, their literal lifeblood, to help another.

Blood donation can also be a way to “save the cat,” a positive act that demonstrates that our character is a kind, compassionate person that the reader should like.

There are two types of blood donation that I’m going to talk about. This post will discuss a typical blood donation, where the character’s blood is tested, a set quantity is drawn off, and the blood is banked. This can be a directed donation for a specific person, typically done in a hospital, or an undirected donation in which a character donates blood for a bank to use later, which is likely to be done at a blood drive.

The second post, which we’ll talk about in the near future, is a person-to-person transfusion, in which one character’s vein is linked to another’s. This is a far more dangerous scenario which is only done in emergencies in an austere environment where  hospitals, and blood banks, are not an option.

What Are the Minimum Standards for Donation?

To donate blood, a character must….

Weigh at least 110 lbs (50kg)

Be at least 17 years of age

Have not donated whole blood in the last 56 days (8 weeks)

Be feeling well and healthy

Not be taking antibiotics, aspirin related products, or blood thinners

Not be a male who has had sex with another male in the last year. (The American Red Cross and FDA advocate that gender is self-identified; the ARC has a whole page about LGBT donors located here.)

Full eligibility requirements for the American Red Cross are found here.

What’s the Process Like?

The process for a typical blood donation looks like this:

The character registers with an intake person. Often they’re offered a “gimme” as an incentive to sign up and donate, such as lip balm or a small book. They’re given a ticket (or have a donor card), which is scanned by a barcode reader.

They answer a very, very detailed questionnaire, which asks everything from their height and weight, whether a male character has had sex with other men ever, which countries they’ve visited in what timeframe, or whether they’ve ever had a graft of their meninges. These days this is done on a tablet.

The donor will then wait to see an intake nurse, who performs a few checks. They get their blood pressure taken, their pulse taken, and a fingerstick is performed to check the blood’s concentration (hematocrit).

The donor will then wait to actually go and donate. When they go in, the nurse taking the blood will ask which arm the donor prefers; usually donors prefer their non-dominant arm.

The donor will lie down on a cot. The nurse will prepare the supplies, affix pre-printed labels to the bags, and check the character’s name and date of birth.

The nurse will place a blood pressure cuff on the arm above the selected donation site, which is usually the bend of the elbow, and partially inflate the cuff. The character will be given something to squeeze; a rubber or foam stress ball or a roll wrapped in paper is typical.

The nurse will insert the needle into the vein, hopefully on the first attempt and hopefully without “fishing.” The needle is fairly large, a 16ga (the smallest IV needle in common use is a 24ga, the largest is a 14ga). and is taped into position. The entry site will be covered with a small piece of gauze and taped down.

The blood is first sent into a series of tubes for testing. After the vials are drawn, the blood goes down one tube into a small pouch, which is where it’s available to draw from in the blood bank to test for compatibility with recipient blood. After that, blood begins to fill the actual donation bag, which is 500mL in size (or about a pint). During this process the character will be encouraged to squeeze their fist every 5-10 seconds to help improve blood flow.

Blood donation is timed, for reasons I’m not quite sure of. A healthy donor with good vasculature might complete their donation in about 5-6 minutes, while someone with worse veins might complete theirs in 8-10 minutes.

Once the donation is complete, the nurse will clamp off the line, retract the needle, and ask the donor to put pressure on the gauze over their insertion site. The nurse will then get a piece of stretchy, self-stick material known in the biz by its original trade name Vetrap, and roll it around the insertion site. The bandage sticks to itself, theoretically not to skin, and can come in a number of colors; on my last donation, it was teal.

The character will be instructed not to bend over or lift heavy objects for at least 2 hours, to not remove the Vetrap for at least 6 hours, and to increase fluid intake over the next 2 days to compensate for the lost blood volume. They’ll be allowed to lie still if the character feels faint, or sent to sit for a few minutes and recover if they feel well enough to walk. Most donation sites offer juice, water, and snacks — especially cookies — to help restore fluid volume and sugar to the bloodstream.

How Does Blood Donation Feel?

This will vary from donor to donor. Genetic males, and those with larger bodies, typically have a slightly higher blood volume than genetic females, and thus tend to tolerate significant blood loss (such as donation) better, but the effects of donation can be felt by anyone.

It’s very common for donor characters to feel dizzy, lightheaded, or nauseous after a donation. Headaches are quite frequent, and the donor might feel a need to sit down for a prolonged period after the fact. The  character might simply feel fine after donation.

Remember that this is fiction, so the effects you choose are up to you. Sometimes the effects are felt more severely the next day than the day of the donation.

It’s common for the needle site to bruise significantly, particularly if the vein was small or the nurse was inexperienced and had to “fish” for a vein. This will start almost immediately after donation and will continue to worsen for an hour or two, then will fade over several days to a week.

So that’s a pretty standard blood donation! Next time in Part 2 we’ll discuss how donor-to-recipient, or direct transfusion works, and how your characters can make it work in dire circumstances!

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

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Mob Psycho Is A Message To Manchildren

[[This is cross-posted on the public feed on our Patreon!!]]

Hello travelers!! Julian here.

Maybe the most common question that podcast writers get is: "How is writing a podcast different than writing for film, or for TV?"The phrasing will change, but this is often what people who are interested in storytelling want to know. It's not a poorly considered question, either, and fans should never be afraid to ask it. But I thought I would write up a little something on the subject, as I understand it, because I have written dead-ended projects in several different media. I've written comic scripts; plays; a feature-length screenplay in college, in lieu of a senior thesis; and now, scripts for several podcast projects. Podcasting has been a fantastic, challenging medium to tackle, and relies on different things to be effective in communicating drama.

In theory, writing audiodrama should feel like writing for the screen; you're creating scenes that play out in real(ish) time, for actors to bring to life. A director has to steer how the actors interpret the script, and then the actors have to make the roles feel genuine.

(The Room - w. & d. Tommy Wiseau, 2003)

In practice, audiodrama writing feels the most like writing a comic, albeit one intended for dramatic fan readings. Comic writers exist in a close partnership with their artist(s), most likely a team of 2-6 others who render pencils, inks, colors, and lettering. The interpretation is deliberately stylistic, to establish tone and texture. However, when actually writing an episode of an audiodrama, my moment-to-moment process is quite similar to how I write for the screen: imagine myself in the setting, with the characters, trying to catch a whiff of what they really feel and report it accurately. 

The primary difference is: if what I've written even partly relies on a visual element for the scene's impact to land, I go back into the scene and try something else.

(Pretty Deadly - w. Kelly Sue Deconnick, a. Emma Rios)

Audiodrama is amazing, because in the hands of an audio designer with a strong style and design sense -- a sorcerer of sound synthesis i.e. Mischa Stanton -- creating the world you hear in your mind makes it that much easier to internalize. What's more, what you see in your mind is never limited by something as mundane as a budget. By and large, audiodrama fans are amazing, sensitive people who understand the value of accepting one's experiences as a part of them. They are often wise, and hungry for freedom but open to guidance.

Film is celebrated as a "transportive" medium; you can see and hear a world potentially nothing like our own, the tech being what it is now. I would argue it is no more "transportive" than the best books, but we are extremely visual beings. "Seeing is believing" and so on.Listening to an audiodrama is not limited by venue, or time of day. The times you spend with us - listening to StarTripper!! - are yours,  selected by you. A lot of those times are private ones you carve out around the rest of a busy day, and I know how valuable those times are. We can age as much as we like, but do we ever let go of the instinct to pretend? The instinct to imagine?

It will not come as a shock to listeners of this show that I spent a lot of time as a kid reading Calvin & Hobbes. I still remember the angle of the sun through my bedroom windows on the day I first read Something Under The Bed Is Drooling. I was probably reading it to avoid doing something I actually should have been doing, but it was my first C&H book. I couldn't tear myself away. 

I hold those times close, because they are part of the genesis myself as a creator. I saw imagination and creative process visualized in black and white, reflected through a kid who really didn't have it all together just yet. 

Sound familiar?

As ever, thank you for flying with us

I've been going back through my Tumblr archives. I started because I was going to seek out the writing I'd posted there but not AO3, and collect it all here. But most of what I found was stuff that was just snippets that became whole works on AO3, and very little that was actually exclusive Tumblr content. So that idea went by the wayside and I've just been reading my old stuff, with some fascination.

One one hand there's no difference between 2014 and now for me, but on the other hand, dang that was a long time ago. Some things, I just set down on a coffee table in 2014 and they're still there, more or less-- I'm speaking metaphorically, but like, literally in some cases too. Like, nothing has happened so incidental asides are still exactly as I left them and still "current" mentally, for me-- that wasn't the "past", it was just, you know, the other day, a bit ago, I dunno, I was in the middle of something and I'll come back to it.

But other things I'm like who WAS that bitch??  I was a lot less mentally settled than I am now.