Hi. My name is Eve and I'm a blood donor reject. The nice folks at the Red Cross say I have nothing to be ashamed of. And they even gave me a sticker. But it doesn't say "Be nice to me, I gave blood today." Oh, no. It says, "Make someone's day. Give blood." Which as anyone can tell you is just a nice way of saying, "REJECT." They even invited me to sit down and have a snack with all the folks who actually did give blood. So there I sat sipping water while all the people with iodined elbows and Band-Aids sucked down juice and cookies. They gave me a special Red Cross bottle of water. The label read "Better luck next time."

And don't think I didn't notice how all the juice-drinking, blood-giving folks inched away when I sat down. They eyed my still intact arms and asked themselves, "Geez, what's wrong with her?"

Oh sure, I could have used the old "I used to live in Uganda" excuse. But the Red Cross is now more concerned about people who've eaten steak tartar in England than they are about folks who lived in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. Uganda isn't even on their no-no list anymore! And I could have said, "the old malaria is acting up again." But three years since my last certified bout with malaria, no one's buying that tired excuse anymore.

So I had no choice. I had to come clean. I was rejected for...heat rash! Yup, on the 90-degree day I'd decided to donate, I had three infinitesimally small bumps on my inner arms - two on my left and one on the right - completely invisible to the average man or woman. But Red Cross nurses are trained to pick this stuff up. And thank God that they are. For it is this eagle-eyed attention to skin protrusions that is keeping the nation's blood supply free of a horrible rash of...well...heat rash!

The nurse actually tried to explain how these tiny bumps that I hadn't even noticed could actually contaminate my pint of blood. I don't recall any of her explanation. I was picturing a horrendous train wreck, in which hundreds of people lay gravely wounded across the wreckage, oozing blood turning the ground crimson. And as the good folks from the Red Cross come onto the scene, I imagined the cries of "Let me die if you must, but for God's sake, don't give me the blood with the prickly heat!"

But don't let my blood donation experience stop you. Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE to find out how you can donate blood (providing you don't have that nasty prickly heat rash).

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