Should You Donate Plasma?

 When I was going to college in my late teens and early twenties, I was always short on cash. I worked while I was going to school, but it never seemed to be enough. In my search for ways to make extra money that didn't take up a lot of time, I found the opportunity of plasma donation.

The basic arrangement is that you give them your plasma, and you get money. The time commitment is pretty low - a typical donation appointment lasts around an hour, but could be anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour and a half. You can usually go twice a week, or 8 times per month.

Different donation centers offer different rates, but the one I went to offered a new donor bonus of around $200, and then it was $20 for the first donation in a week and $30 for the second donation in a week. If you didn't miss any opportunities to donate and made it there 8 times a month, you could make $200!

That isn't a ton of money, but considering how easy it is to donate plasma (you basically lay down and watch a movie or read for an hour), I considered it a pretty sweet deal.

I'm going to address more of my thoughts on donating plasma below, but to answer the title's question of whether you should donate plasma, I would say "yes".

It does truly depend on each individual person, but I think it is generally a good opportunity for most people. The process does involve getting a needle inserted into your arm and leaving it there for an hour, so if you are afraid of needles, donating plasma is probably not for you.

If you don't meet some basic requirements, they won't allow you to donate. You have to be within a particular weight range, so if you weigh too little or too much, you won't be allowed to donate. They also prevent people with certain diseases from donating (which makes sense if that disease could be transmitted to whoever receives your plasma).

If you aren't scared of needles or the process, and you aren't disqualified from becoming a plasma donor, I would recommend plasma donation for people looking for a little extra cash.

Is It Difficult To Donate Plasma?

Donating plasma is pretty easy. You find a plasma donation center (I used to go to BioLife Plasma Services, and I went to CSL Plasma once, but I'm sure there are a bunch depending on where you live) and schedule an appointment.

Your first appointment will take significantly longer than a regular donation appointment because they have to onboard you. They will give you some training (probably upwards of 30 minutes) in the form of videos which teach you what plasma does, what they use it for after you donate it, how the donation process works, potential side effects and risk of donating, how to prepare for a successful donation, and anything else they think is important for someone who donates plasma to know.

On your first visit they will also give you a more thorough health screening and physical. They will ask you a lot of questions about your medical history and how healthy you are. 

If you fail any part of the screening for a minor or temporary reason (like having too high of a pulse or blood pressure out of the accepted range), they will sometimes ask you to come back another time to try again. 

If you fail for a severe or permanent reason, you will be disqualified from donating plasma forever, and I believe there is a central database that is shared between all donation centers, so you will be barred from doing so anywhere. Some of the major disqualifying factors have to do with having certain diseases, having received certain types of organ or tissue transplants, and having used intravenous drugs at any point in your life.

If you pass the physical exam, they will take you out to the donation floor and show you the typical intake process of a normal donation appointment. They will show you where you will take a much shorter health screening before every visit (you just stand at a computer and answer a standard series of health questions). They will show you where you will have your vitals checked before every visit (an intake specialist will check your pulse, blood pressure, and iron levels of your blood, etc).

They will show that after you pass those screening steps, you will be paired with a phlebotomist (the name for the technician that draws your blood) working a section of the donation floor who will assign you to a donation bed and a collection machine. 

If you haven't ever seen a donation bed, they look a lot like the bed in a doctor's exam room. They are roughly horizontal, but with an incline for your head and sometimes your feet, too. They are padded and pretty comfortable.

You can put your coat, backpack, or anything else you have with you in a cubby in the bottom of the donation bed. You can keep your book or laptop out to use while you are donating. You then lay on the bed and get comfortable and pull up your shirt sleeve so that your inner elbow is exposed. They usually have an armrest of some sort so you can just set your arm down.

The phlebotomist will put on an inflatable arm/blood pressure cuff over your bicep. They will rub iodine over the vein on the inside of your elbow to sterilize the area. They insert a single use needle into your arm. They connect your needle to a length of hose which connects to a box on a machine which collects your whole blood, which in turn connects to a bag which will collect only the plasma portion of your blood. 

Then they turn the machine on and let you be while you donate. They wander around their section hooking people up and disconnecting people who have finished their donations, but they are also available to help you if you need anything while donating. You might have discomfort or notice something that would need their attention, and you can call them over and they will assist you.

The machine collects your whole blood (which is the plasma with all of the red blood cells in it) and spins it in a centrifuge to separate the red blood cells from the plasma. The machine then transfers the plasma to the collection bag and returns the red blood cells back into your arm.

The machine does this in cycles. There will be many cycles during a single donation, maybe around 10 cycles. There is the cycle where the machine is filling with whole blood, during which you are supposed to squeeze your fist and release it repeatedly to "pump" the blood out and into the machine. Once you've pumped enough to fill the box, you will get a break during which you won't have to do anything.

The blood spins until all of the plasma has been separated out and sent to the collection bag, then the return cycle begins. During the return cycle, the red blood cells which are mixed with a bit of anticoagulant is sent back into your arm. The anticoagulant prevents your blood from clotting, and for some people can cause some mild and temporary numbness or tingling in your lips or fingertips. 

The blood is also closer to room temperature than when it left your body, so when it comes back into your body it can feel very cold. It is a very interesting sensation to feel "ice water" traveling through your veins. It is one of the only times I have ever felt my veins.

After the return cycle is complete the process starts over and you begin pumping again to fill the machine with blood.

You repeat this cycle until the plasma bag is full. If you can pump your blood out faster, then your appointment can go more quickly. If you don't pump your blood out very quickly, your appointment can take much longer. Sometimes they will give you a stress ball to squeeze to help you pump more effectively.

The process is pretty mindless, and you can read or watch TV the whole time. You are allowed to listen to music or daydream, or basically anything you can do while laying still, but you cannot sleep or take a nap. You need to remain conscious the entire time so that you can call attention to anything that feels wrong, and so that they know something is wrong if you are passed out.

Being able to read or watch TV is what made donating plasma feel so easy. It wasn't like a job where you had to exert yourself to earn money. You could literally just relax and get paid.

Once your machine determines that the plasma collection bag is full, a light or buzzer goes off which will let the phlebotomist know to come back over and disconnect you from the machine.

They will remove the needle from your arm, place a cotton ball or piece of gauze over the hole, and wrap your arm with medical wrap. They take the plasma bag to a collection room to be processed, throw away everything that touched your blood, sanitize the bed, and you are free to leave.

Then it's time to get paid! I don't know of any plasma donation company which pays cash. As far as I am aware, they all automatically load your payments onto a prepaid/reloadable debit card that they provide to you. If it is your first visit, they will hand you an envelop which will contain your card and instructions for how to set it up and how to use it. 

After your first visit you won't need to do anything to get paid. The money will be automatically transferred to the card when they scan your plasma bag to check it into the collection room.

They recommend you leave your bandage on for at least a few hours and don't do any exercise or strenuous activity for around half a day. You will be fine if you take it easy, but if you over-exert yourself, you can get really tired and dizzy and pass out. You will want to make sure to drink plenty of water and eat enough healthy food so that your body can replenish the plasma that was just taken out.

That is the entire process of donating plasma, which is actually fairly easy. I don't think it is difficult to donate plasma, and hopefully my description didn't deter you from trying it out.

Is It Easy To Get Paid For Donating Plasma?

The reloadable debit card they use to pay you for your plasma donation is both handy and convenient, and also a pain. 

It is convenient in the same way that direct deposit for your regular paycheck is convenient. You don't have to sign a check or go to a bank. Your money is ready immediately and can be spent anywhere. You don't need to keep track of cash, since it is on your card.

The card they give you is also inconvenient, and frankly a bit of a scam. If you are like me, you would want the money you earned from donating plasma to be in your regular bank account with the rest of your money. The donation centers don't offer that option. The money has to go on the prepaid card.

You are free to use that card wherever you would normally use your other debit card, but it usually says the name of the plasma company right on it. That might not be an issue for you, but it is possible you might not want people to know you donate plasma, and having to use a card with their name on it makes it hard not to make that public.

The card also charges pretty outrageous fees. It seems like half of the packet of information they give you when they first assign you the card just explains all of the fees they charge you for every little thing you do.

There is a fee to transfer the money from the prepaid card to your bank account. There is a fee to withdraw money from the card at an ATM. There is a fee to get cash back at a checkout register. There is even a fee for non-use. If you don't spend money from the card within a certain amount of time, they begin to collect fees from the balance. The only way to not get charged fees is to use your card like you would use your normal debit card to pay for things.

That fee structure makes it hard to save the money you make for donating plasma towards something like a vacation over time. But it isn't really that bad if you just use it to buy groceries or normal stuff and spend it fairly quickly.

Are You "Selling" Your Plasma or "Donating" It?

I used to call it "selling blood", because it seems like a perfectly accurate way to describe the transaction. When you go through the process of being screened and trained to be a donor, they explain to you that you are actually donating your plasma, but being paid to compensate you for the time you spent donating. 

It is a strange legal loophole situation, because it is illegal to sell any part of your body or bodily fluids. So, it would actually be illegal for them to explicitly pay you for your plasma. But somehow paying you for your time to give them your plasma is perfectly legal. 

I always thought that explanation failed any scrutiny, because you are paid a flat fee for your donation. Whether you take 40 minutes to donate or an hour and twenty minutes, you get paid the same. But your donation is always the same volume of plasma. 

Seems strange that if what you are being compensated for is your time, that the compensation doesn't change with the amount of time you spend. But I never really cared, because I was just happy that I could get paid for something so easy.

Is It Safe To Donate Plasma?

Donating plasma is very safe. I am not a doctor and have no medical training and am not an expert on the subject, so take what I say as merely my impression of the subject. I donated plasma regularly for years and suffered no serious negative consequences.

I would sometimes get really tired after I donated, but that was temporary and mild. And after having a needle inserted in the same spot on the same vein so many times I have a permanent dent in my vein that some people call a "crater". It doesn't hurt, and it isn't very noticeable, but it is something that donating plasma gave me.

I read an article about donating plasma which said that some people will have their vein so badly damaged from so many needle insertions that they will have trouble in the future with needle insertions for I.V. drips and other things a doctor might need your vein for.

There is also the rare possibility that you will have a negative reaction with the anticoagulant which will cause illness, injury, or death.

Overall, I think plasma donation is very safe.

Are The People Who Work At Plasma Centers Nurses?

The people who insert your needle and hook you up to the machines are called phlebotomists. They wear white lab coats and give the impression that they are medically trained. I always believed that they were nurses or going to school to become nurses. I thought that working at a plasma donation center was just another job in the medical field.

I overheard a couple phlebotomists at a plasma center talking about how they were amazed at how so few people working there were nurses or were pursuing any type of work in the medical field. They were just totally normal people who had no background in medicine at any level. They just needed a job, applied for this job, and received some basic on-the-job training for how to collect blood.

I believe by law the plasma centers have to have at least one nurse on staff at all times in case something happens that requires serious medical attention, but there is usually no more than the one nurse legally required there at a time.

That nurse tends to have an office and I believe they usually do the initial intake exam for new donors. They are almost never the one who takes your blood.

The phlebotomists who will actually hook you up will be people with minimal training. The job pays much less than a person with a nursing degree could make at a clinic or hospital, so it makes sense why people with actual medical training aren't doing those jobs.

I still feel fairly comfortable with donating plasma knowing what level of training the staff have because it doesn't actually take that much medical knowledge to stick a needle in an arm. There isn't all that much they could do to really screw it up.

I even thought that it could be dangerous to me because they might accidentally inject air into my veins which could travel to my heart or brain and cause me injury or death. I've seen that in movies and thought that any little bit of air in your cardiovascular system would cause you serious harm. 

After I researched it, however, I found out that it actually takes a lot of air in your veins to cause you harm. The tiny bit of air they might accidently introduce to my blood would dissipate into tiny bubbles and cause no harm at all.

As much as I don't feel unsafe with technicians that have so little training, I do feel deceived by the company. It seems like they should be straightforward with that information, or at least not do everything they can to make it seem like they are nurses.

Are Plasma Donation Centers Nice Inside?

Just like with any business or industry, there are good ones and less good ones. I went to the same BioLife Plasma center for years and that place was very nice. It was clean, well decorated, well lit. Everyone was friendly. It had a convenient and interesting layout. The furniture was nice. 

I felt safe and comfortable there and it was pleasant to be there.

When I moved to a new city and was no longer able to use that same donation site, I searched for the nearest plasma donation center to my new place and found that it was CSL Plasma. I went there and it was completely different. It was like they rented an abandoned retail space in a strip mall and filled it with used beds and machines. The floor tiles were stained and looked dirty. Some of them were even broken.

The bathrooms were gross. Everything about the place felt thrown together at the last minute and for as little as they could spend. The equipment seemed outdated. The staff was less friendly. I didn't feel comfortable there. I finished my first donation there, but I never returned, and I haven't donated plasma since.

My entire experience is only based on two locations. One was very nice and one was not so nice. It might just be those individual locations, too. There might be bad BioLife locations and very excellent CSL locations. Those were just the experiences I have had.

Is Donating Plasma Good For Society?

Donating plasma sounds like a good thing. It sounds like you are being generous and helping people. 

When I went to donate plasma, they would always have posters on the walls that would tell the story of individual people who benefitted from the plasma that was donated. It would be a picture of some person and their own description of their disease, how that affected their life, and how their life is better now because of the treatments they receive which make use of the plasma that is donated.

Stories like that would always make me feel good. It made me feel like what I was doing was helping society and other people. Sure, I was doing it for money, but it wasn't only selfish, because other people were benefitting.

I even thought of it in the same way I thought about donating blood. The stuff I was donating was going to save lives and help others.

But it turns out that donating plasma and donating blood are very different things.

When you donate blood, you are usually donating it to a non-profit organization that works with hospitals to provide the blood to people for very little cost. The only costs incurred by the patient are typically associated with processing the blood and testing it for safety. It is not motivated by a desire for profit, but simply to cover the costs to deliver the blood to the patient.

In the case of donating blood, it is reasonable to say that the person who benefits the most from your donation is the end patient.

When you donate plasma, however, you are donating to a private, for-profit company. They are pharmaceutical companies which take your donated plasma and create products which they sell to patients for as much as they can get people to pay for them. Their goal is to increase their profits. They care little for the donor or the eventual recipient. They ultimately care for themselves and making themselves richer.

When you donate plasma, the person you help the most is actually the pharmaceutical company you donated to.

It is still a good thing to donate plasma, because without the plasma the life-saving treatments it goes on to create wouldn't be available at all. I could imagine an even better system, though, that maximized the overall benefit to society by structuring it much more like the system for donating whole blood.

Have you ever donated plasma? What did you think about the process? Would you recommend it to others? Let me know in the comments below!