Purple Haze
Who is there when we call?
By Lauren Bagian

May 20, 2010

There is a fascinating thing about holding a blood drive in a high school. For one thing, the interest and participation is huge, and there are a few reasons for this. First of all, the largest and most important reason is that high school students love to serve in any way possible. Secondly, giving blood gets you out of class for a substantial amount of time, but we won’t tell our teachers that. And last, but of course not least, there is something very liberating about being over 16 years old and not requiring parental permission to do something; at 18, donating blood is the only thing that goes on at school for which I did not require a permission form signed by a parent, and many other students find that attractive as well.

Every parent knows what I am talking about, the terrifying argument of, “I’m 16 (or 17 or 18), I should be able to…”--you get the picture. As teenagers, that’s our favorite argument. With each birthday comes more weight to that argument, but no matter how big that number gets, it’ll never be large enough that we’ll totally be on our own.

After donating blood on Monday, May 24, I told myself that I felt completely fine. I didn’t feel dizzy at all, no nausea, only the normal slight headache that I get everyday around third period. So, after the phlebotomist from the Central Pennsylvania Blood Bank had taken my blood and sat me up in the chair, I grabbed my free cookies and was off to class before she could even tell me to rest a bit. An hour later, while practicing with my church choir director, my vision was blacking out and waves of nausea had me heaving into a trash can until my mother could pick me up and take me over to her office at the elementary school.

After waking up from a nap on the plastic feeling cot in the Dillsburg Elementary nurse’s office with a towel under my head, I opened my eyes to see a fourth grade girl across from me, also feeling sick and getting sent home. Instantly I was thrown back to the days where if I felt sick the school nurse would call my mother and she would have to come and pick me up from school and take me home to rest, which is ultimately what happened to me that day. Usually if I feel sick in school I can drive myself home and handle it on my own, take some aspirin and take a nap, but on Monday I needed help.

My driver’s license says I’m 18, so I can vote, drive, take myself to doctor’s appointments and make a lot of my own decisions, but there is no age that determines when I stop needing anyone to take care of me, because that day will never come. When you’re sick and heaving into a trash can, all that you want in that moment is someone to hold your hair and pat your back and hold a cool washcloth to your forehead, and for me it was my mom. We all get older and more independent, but we are never able to take care of everything on our own, and it’s silly to think that we can. While we are able to do more and more with every day, we must remember that there are people who, when we are desperate, will be there when we call because, believe me, one day you’re going to need someone to call.