You might not be blessed to help people out of their misery/pain/troubles always but you can always do your bit. First time in life I made an attempt to help someone whom I have never known before and that too in most unusual way. This is going to be looooonnnng post.
One fine evening while returning from office I received a call where someone asked me if I had a particular blood group. Since I was driving I asked the person to call me back after sometime. When I got the call second time I realized it was attempt by an uncle to save his new born nephew. I decided without a moment I would help him out in whatever way I could. The kid was in a hospital in Gwalior and was born premature, 7 months and have been hospitalized for the last one month and needed blood(a component and not whole blood) which is kind of rare and I have the same blood group. Hence I packed and left home right in the night so that I could be there next morning, though my parents were apprehensive but they couldn’t say anything as the cause was noble.
Let me give you a brief I am regular blood donor and one of my ex teammates Jaydeep Gupta had introduced me to www.friends2support.org approx 1.5 yrs back. Ever since I have joined the corporate world(close to 6yrs back) I knew my blood group to be A2+ as it was reported in pre-joining medical tests which major MNCs do for all their employees. For most of the world life is simpler with A,B, AB and O blood groups and RH factors as + or -. Now some of might be wondering what is A2+, but don’t be surprised if I tell you more than half the docs I have met don’t even know much about it and 90% of the clinics and institutes I have visited don’t even have facility to test it. It might sound even funnier with most lab technicians I met told me there is nothing as such and someone is trying to mislead me :-). Let me kill technical details and get to the story.
I start of for Gwalior which is about an overnight journey without a reserved ticket, but happened to get one just time at the station on current booking window(last ticket on 2nd AC) which was closing. Hence the journey starts on happy note and I reach without any problems. I was picked up the station by the anxious father at 5 o’clock morning. We reach the hospital and wait for doctors to arrive. Blood banks are completely different entity and hospitals have tie ups with them. And finally we reach the blood bank and usual testing starts. And I am in for a biggest surprise of my life, the blood group is A1+ and not A2+. I just couldn’t digest it all and ask the guy to test it again and he confirms again that its A1 and not A2. It would be understatement to say I was embarrassed, disappointed and what not. I talked with the father and we decide we will get it second opinion. And the hunt starts to find a second lab which could cross verify the result. I just couldn’t imagine how would the parents be feeling as all hopes they had for last 3 days was that their kid would finally get 30ml of component today.
We went to every lab in city and figured out none of them had the tests to verify and most of them stated that there is no such group. By late afternoon we were able to find the second place which could verify it. The tests came negative again but the good news was we figured out that the tests for A1 and A2 is never done till asked and hence there is no donor list with such classification. So we started getting the everyone who had A+ to be tested for A1 and A2. To cut story short it was tested for about 100+ people till now and none of them had A2. Since I could not do anything more, I visited the hosts place had lunch and left back for Gurgaon. I had made up my mind soon after that I will put a post so that people get to know how a small effort from them can help save somebody’s precious life. I returned last night but was so disappointed I didn’t feel like doing anything. I just got a call from kid’s father and got to know that by using synthetic method the kid was given the components from another blood and has reacted positively to the treatment, which lifted my mood. All the kid need was 30ml and generally we donated one unit(350-450ml). You never know when you small effort could help save someone life.
A humble request please register on www.friends2support.org
and here is link which might provide the purpose to do your bit.
and here is link which might provide the purpose to do your bit.
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