Finally, Got my blood sucked!!


I used to be quite a regular blood donor back home in India and must have donated at least 10-12 times. After coming to Singapore I tried a few times to donate and each time I couldn’t due to some very minor procedural issues.

Yesterday I had to go to NUH for a medical appointment and after that was done I happened to be around the Blood bank. I decided that I should resume my donation. But Singapore procedures refused to make things easy for me :( Apparently I couldn’t donate because I had been to India in May. The friendly lady at the reception told me that the current regulations have become stringent due to cases of bird flu/ Malaria and if you have visited some of the bird flu/ Malaria affected countries in the last six months then you become ineligible for donation. India was a country on the list and I was rejected for visiting my homeland :(

I was keen on donating, so I persisted and the friendly lady at the reception directed me to Singapore General Hospital. Apparently the facility at SGH had more advanced screening capabilities and hence would be in a position to accept my donation. So off I went to SGH to infect some Singaporean with my blood. But apparently that Singaporean got lucky as the facility in SGH has a weekly holiday on Monday, ie yesterday :(

Now it was getting a bit irritating that despite such good intentions I couldn’t execute such a simple deed. So I crossed half of Singapore again today to reach SGH to attempt another shot at getting sucked :(

It wasn't easy, the initial paper work was quite irritating. Some of the questions were a tad rude and in fact the rules about UK and Europe at first glance didn’t quite seem very logical. However fortunately this time I survived the procedures and finally got my blood sucked for a good cause ;) Though the process occurred only with riders. I was told that due to my visit to India my blood will be quarantined and will be used only after a certain period. Whatever inconvenience I may have gone through the thing is that if I need any blood transfusion I would feel very safe if it originated from Singapore.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Senti side of me

Hi Guys, In the last few months I had a chat with some of you guys. And all of a sudden I realised that I dont have anything to talk about. Rahul and Shilpi called up most in this period and often I just did not know what to say and the forced conversation lasted for not more than a few minutes. Then the mails from regulars like Rahul(Both), Anit and Rohit have actually dried up. It used to be such a pleasure getting a mail from these guys. But somehow today all I see in my inbox is a few fwds and mailers which I very happily block. Now let me admit that Bhanu, Anit and Shuchi have been nice enough to send some thought provoking fwds. But I would be more pleased to get hold of a mail addressed to me. So i thought of asking some of you about how it felt getting my mails. The first reaction was of course that it is painfully long and boring. The second category of people actually said that they did not mind getting these boring strings of ascii characters. I also got some intere...
Read more

The Incredible Padma Aunty!!

Image
The day before yesterday I spend more than 2 hours, totally mesmerized by the memorial service of Padma Vikraman Nayar , organized by the Singapore Malayali Association (SMA) . I have met her only once, a few years ago, but the eulogies removed any sense of unfamiliarity about her. Padma Aunty as she was popularly called was more of a background person and the extent of eulogies was disproportionate to any of the formal positions, she held within the SMA committee. And most surprisingly, all but one of the speakers on stage were males, mostly past SMA Presidents, a reflection of the authority she commanded during her life. At a personal level, I really struggle with the Malayalam Language and often felt that I was more of a Delhite than a Malayali. Despite this rather distant view, I have been amazed at the SMA’s annual Onam Village celebrations. The scale and extent of the program is astonishing, with at least a few thousand people attending. I always wondered about the incred...
Read more

Data Science 101 by Puneet Garg, Head of Data Science, Carousell

Image
On Friday, I heard Puneet Garg , the new Head of Data Science at Carousell give a very passionate AI 101 talk at the GA Data Science immersive program that I am part of. Puneet had spent 13 years at Microsoft before joining Carousell, and has over a decade of AI experience. He was part of the Bing team, where he worked on cutting edge technologies like Natural Language for Cortana, Speech Recognition and Language Translation for Indian languages, Human like Chat bots (Ruuh) for India etc. Talking about Data Science, he felt that a Data Scientist's key job is to e xtract insights and identify predictive models from large volumes of data. And in this job, Machine Learning is a key tool in the Data Scientist's arsenal. He used the following graphic to beautifully explain the difference between AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Image Source He highlighted how the Artificial Intelligence algorithms had been in existence for a long time, but they were infeasible...
Read more