That said, besides one week of chemo every four weeks, Mom occasionally needs to become a vampire. So I have to sit through a blood transfusion every week or two. So I've learned a lot about blood and blood transfusions. The common ones that we're used to are full blood/red blood cells. Mom gets a lot of those. And they look like bags of blood -- bright red viscous fluid. Those are also the familiar ones we all know in regards to blood type, where O- is the universal donor and AB+ is the universal recipient.
But then there's what we're doing today. The bag attached to Mom looks like it contains a very thick chicken broth and if you didn't know better, you'd not guess it was blood. It's platelets and plasma -- the clotting factor. The interesting thing about getting platelets and plasma is that the universal donor/recipient are reversed -- AB+ is the universal platelet/plasma donor, and O- is the universal recipient because the antibodies (the parts that interact with the antigens) are carried in the plasma. People with O blood have A and B antibodies in the plasma, and people with AB blood have none.
The short of it? Today Mom is being a very picky vampire and getting platelets/plasma. It's a slight change in the routine.
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