Live under capitalism

Must get sucked by vampire to survive

I did for a period. It kinda sucks because if they mess something up you don’t get paid. Sometimes you have to wait a while and it makes it not as worth the time. The pay generally goes down after your first month promo is over

Still, its worth trying out and was good time for getting some reading done. It really depends how well your center is run

I never had any medical issues or side effects, except that alcohol would hit me like a truck the days I donated

The whole premise of it a is really icky and you are being exploited in a major way. The people working there are also not paid all that well AFAIK. You’ll notice that the centers tend to be in low income neighborhoods. And while they say you are “doing a great thing” and helping people with rare diseases, you are really helping them turn huge profits as the specialized medicines they make from the plasma are very expensive for the patients as well.

I had the best time with grifols/biomat. I also tried biolife (decent) and octapharma (bad)

When you’re promo is up, you can switch to a different center for their promo but you must wait one week in?between.

I did it back in college but it kinda sucks. I had weird bruises all the time, sometimes I’d get turned away for not having juicy enough veins, sometimes it hurt to get jabbed. Not a fun experience but it got me by.

It also sucks that they’re allowed to call it “donating” when these companies primarily sell and export your plasma for profit. It’s selling blood to vampires.

HRT bars me from I have learned

I’d do it regularly but so much of the time I spent in the centers was just waiting around doing nothing. Even though the process only took an hour or so, you had to wait 2-3 just to sit down in the chair. $80 for 4 hours is still worth it but only just barely since you can only do it twice a week.

It kinda bills itself as a “Quick in and out deal to get some spending money” but it’s closer to an entire half-day of waiting/donating and then feeling kinda tired for the rest of it.

I’m thinking about doing it but mostly because it might cut my microplastics level down and I’ll also get paid for it.

Always wondered why those places exist but there’s nowhere that will pay you for whole blood. A little bit too on-the-nose?

I’ve done it before but only when really desperate, I don’t really like doing it and I never did it more than like once a month, even though you’re allowed to do 2 times a week

It’s illegal in every place i’ve lived in, that’s why.

most places have a promotional rate that resets every month or so, then after you go for the initial month they rely on you being dependent on them for income. definitely line up 3 spots and rotate them out over time. also, make sure to tell the truth about the frequency you’re donating. they all pull those stats from the same database

My sister did that in undergrad for extra cash and it seemed to mostly work out for her. I cut myself and injured myself enough working as a machinist and factory worker that took too many stupid risks to think being down on bodily fluids pre-injury wasn’t a good idea. Then I have mostly made it through grad school and academia with alcoholism, which I think may cause problems or disqualify me, so haven’t looked into it recently.

I used to work right next to a plasma donation place. I had too much bloodwork done as a kid, now the only way I’d consent to having a significant amount of blood taken from me is if a doctor said “if we don’t take this blood you are literally going to die.” And even then I’d think about it for a bit.

Payment for blood and plasma donation is illegal here, unless you’re selling other people’s blood products

i had to lie down from the thought alone. i tend to pass out when i bleed or have blood work done, i wish i didn’t have this hangup because i could really use the money. also they probably don’t want blood with THC in it.

I did it for about two years until I kept getting repeatedly kicked for my blood work being below the acceptable threshold (I think its the Iron and probably a bit of under hydration during the summer months, I can’t remember).

The amount of cash would vary greatly due to bonuses which were temporary. The place I went to didn’t always automatically apply some of these types of incentives and you’d have to remember to show somebody the email/app screen so that a tech could apply the bonus to your account.

At the place that is near me, if you donated twice in a calendar week you’d get the max non bonus payment (75$ US) but the first donation of the week was a very low dollar amount (25$) and the second donation would be the higher one (50$).

College town, so when school is in session (or when COVID was taken seriously in the USA) the wait time would be something like a 1 hour minimum (and I think I waited almost 3 hours before) just to get into a bed.

If anything goes wrong, you typically don’t get paid. If a technician messes up and makes a big bruise on your arm during one visit that is still visible on the next visit, that arm can’t be used. Get kicked too many times in a row and you’re locked out for a while and you may need to go through another physical before being cleared to donate again.

My wife would usually go in with me until some nerve thing was getting agitated from… something. Not sure if it was the needle in the arm, some other effect of the anti-coagulant, or just having to sit with your arm at a particular position for at least an hour (more if the techs are swamped and it takes a while to get you unhooked.)

Its possible to have a bad reaction to the anti-coagulant (usually fixable by taking some cheapo antacids for the calcium-something-or-other before getting pumped or when you start feel the negative effects start).

Be really sure you are aware of when the place closes for the holidays as that can mess up your ability to get the max weekly payment. I’d feel like dog shit for the rest of the day and it didn’t help that its almost a 2 hour round trip for me. So I’d be trying to do grocery shopping and some other errands afterwards and feeling really light headed and then get home to do outside work and moving very slowly to keep falling down.

So its great if you have easy transport to and from the place and have a pretty flexible day schedule and aren’t super reliant on it for paying necessities and don’t have any negative reactions.