Plasma - the end of an era

OCTOBER 2008: Randy Harward finds an easy way to score cash. Donating, plasma.

Actually, donating is kind of generous term. You see, in order for it to be a donation you give of yourself freely, like donating blood, or donating your body to science after you die. With plasma, you go twice a week and you're fifty bucks richer.
It's hard to believe I actually did this for a year and a half. But I did. And with the idea that I actually did it twice a week religiously for that long, theoretically I made about $3600 off my bodily fluids.

Not a bad way to make half the value of my car.

But, you must understand this is not an enjoyable experience. After a primary mini-physical, you walk into the center, put your name on a roll, then sit about twenty minutes to a half-hour in a packed lobby. In Spokane, it was really bad because it was filled with homeless people and bums unwiling to get jobs. When your name is called you're led into a small room and are asked a lengthy list of pretty awkward questions: "Have you in the last six months, been incarcerated for more than 48 hours?" "Have you received a smallpox vaccine or been within a smallpox vaccine site of anyone else in the past three months?" After the interrogation, you walk into a large room, which is kept very cold (something about keeping the plasma at certain termperature), you sit down, are stuck with the biggest needle you've ever seen, and sit there for an hour to an hour and a half while blood is sucked out of you, rid of its plasma and then put back into you. The things about the blood returning process is after running through the machine and the seperation, it comes back in extremely cold, so you start to shiver if you don't have a heavy coat or blanket. (My friend Brett, after his first donation, walked out of the room shivering so bad he couldn't put the code into an ATM to get his cash!) Afterwards you walk up to a window, and they hand you 20$ cash (then 30 the second time in the week).

It's easy.

It's a quick way to earn some cash.

It's probably not the healthiest thing to do your system.
And I did for a year and a half.

As luck would have it, I go to donate (err... sell) my plasma this last week, and they tell me after a thorough test, that they've found too many antibodies in my plasma and it's now completely unusuable. And since Ellie and I live together, she would no longer be able to sell plasma either. Ever.
This came at a hard time for Elle and I. We'd been waiting for our financial aid to come through for about a month, and with our busy school schedule we haven't been putting in many hours at our jobs. With the end of the month would come a stack of bills that, realistically, we had no income to pay for. Selling plasma was bringing us $400 a month, enough to cover the rent of our apartment. How on earth were we going to make up for that in our hectic school schedule?
We came home, we got our knees, and said a prayer through tears. We'd felt like we had been doing everything the Lord asked of us, paying tithing, going to church, honoring our callings, working hard in school. Why was this happening now? When our financial situation was dire as it is? No answer came that night. We went to bed feeling lost and hopeless. Depressing thoughts like moving into Ellie's parents place crept into my mind, along with getting night jobs that would take away our time for homework and each other.

The very next day, Ellie opens her school email and finds a message from the Financial Aid Department. It finally came. We had heard horror stories of couples that had been late in getting their FAFSA in, and having to wait until the next semester to receive it. Had that been the case, we probably would have taken out a loan just to get by! God works in mysterious ways: He somehow got us to stop selling our bodily fluids for money, gave us a taste of what financial struggle is like, AND provided for our needs, ALL without affecting the agency of one single person on this earth. How does He do it?!

LESSONS LEARNED:

#1 God doesn't want you selling the plumbing in the temple you call a body. We worked so hard for them in the pre-existence! It's not worth it!

#2 Don't get into debt. Yeah we hear this one all the time. But any addiction is against the Word of Wisdom, to be high in debt is to be low in agency.

#3 Do what's right, God's got your back.