This afternoon we all typed our blood. For whatever reason, Laralee decided we should all know our own blood types; she recently had some bloodwork done and found out she’s O-positive. None of the rest of us had any idea what our types are. Yeah, I know– I’m a bad parent.
Anyway, she bought some home blood test kits, and we all sat around the table and carefully read the instructions. There were several misspellings and grammar errors; if the company couldn’t do a simple spell-check on a few bullet points of text, how accurate were their tests going to be? We pressed on anyway.
The test was pretty simple: there were little cards with four circles, each of which contained some magic chemical. You put a small drop of water in each circle, prick your finger, and add a drop of blood to each one. Then you mix it all around, do the hokey pokey, and check the results against a handy chart of the different blood types. Each of the circles would cause blood of certain types to “agglutinate”, which meant it ended up looking like a mix of little chunky bits of blood.
Zack went right to it, pausing only momentarily to prick his finger.
Kyra had a harder time, holding the little pricker on her finger for a minute and laughing– apparently out of fear. Of course once she finally pressed it and the spring-loaded needle punctured her skin, it was fine.
Alex apparently had some sort of hallucinatory experience.
Then all of us mixed the blood and water and watched the magic. It was a little bit like watercolor painting.
The results? Laralee was confirmed as O-positive (helping us believe that the test was probably legitimate). All of the rest of us were A-positive. Now we know.
Interesting factoid of the day: pureblood Native Americans never have negative blood; they’re always positive. (The words “positive” and “negative” refer to the presence or absence of the Rh(D) or “Rhesus” antigen.)