Blood Donations

Cecilla is a midwife at our clinic and her dad has TB and needed a blood transfusion because he was throwing up blood. We went to visit him at the TB hospital and learned more about the complexity of health care here in Manila. To receive blood in any hospital here you need to have donors to replace the blood. So we went to the hospital and they had no blood and couldn’t take ours. We spent 2 days traveling to different places trying to get the right blood for her dad. 7 of us made it to a hospital that had the blood that he needed and only one of us, Shianna, was able to give blood. 2 of the Filipinas were ruled out for being to small, 3 of us were ruled out for having too low blood pressure and 1 was out for having a runny nose. Only one of the 7 was able to give, so we weren’t able to get all the blood needed. The next day they were able to get the last bag of blood for her dad. The needle used on Shianna is huge, probably a 14 gauge, and they take about 500 ml of blood. I don’t know if that is normal but it really seemed like a lot. To us when a woman bleeds 500 ml it is considered hemorrhage. I was trying to comfort her in the picture but I was really just talking about how big the needle was.