When blood is thicker than water!

I really did have a bit of a geek-gasm over this one! 

Today I issued granulocytes to a patient .... I'd never even seem them before (okay I've only been a BMS for 2 years) but my chief (he's been doing this for hundreds 😉 of years) had never seen them either .... So they're pretty rare!   

But what really amazed me about this case and why I had to tell you about it, was that these infection fighting granulocytes (white blood cells) were donated by the patients SON! Isn't that lovely!!

These cells have a very short half life of 24 hours so must be transfused very soon after donation! Therefore it would be ineffective for the national blood service to collect grans (yep we're on slang terms now :p) to hold as stock as they would more often than not be wasted! 

The donor would have been given a hormone the day before donation to stimulate the production of more white cells. 

This really did touch my heart. There he is poor old Mr. Patient going through the horrible ordeal that is chemo, causing his White cells to fall to a level where his body can no longer fight infection. When his own son (who's life you could say, he owes to his father) steps up to donate rather a lots of blood in what I can imagine is quite an uncomfortable scenario, to give his Dadio a fighting chance of survival and a more comfortable ride through his cancer treatment!