Giving blood turned out to be not so successful yesterday. It's a lot more closely monitored than it was when I used to give blood in the days before the tattoo thing stopped me. For a start, there are some nice questions to answer such as "(For men) have you ever had anal sex with a man in the last three months who has been out of the country and may have had sex with another man" and "(For women) have you ever had anal sex with a man who has had anal sex with another man who has been out of the country in the last three months". Oddly, there was no general questions that went "Have you ever had anal sex in a public toilet with a complete stranger" - although to be fair, I think there was a question that said something like "Have you ever paid for sex in the last 12 months".

All of these questions are simply designed to give the nurses something to chuckle about as they have about as much use as the question on flights to the USA where you have to fill in that form. Yeah - the one where it says "Please tick yes or no - are you a terrorist?"

Anyway, the reason they wouldn't let me give blood was for none of these reasons. At some point you had to claim that you hadn't seen a doctor in the last 6 months for reasons of a cardiac nature - which I have. To cut the story short, I went to see my G.C. (General Charlatan) because of a pain in my chest. I was actually quite glad to have the "pain in my chest" as it took the emphasis off the "pain in my knee" - which after three or four years, is getting a bit boring.

After some poking around, he decided I had trapped a nerve in my chest somehow. I took this to be a fair answer having trapped every other nerve in my body at some point in time and left. The blood nurse however said I should have found this to be an extremely crap answer and I should get a second opinion. She then rang her blood consultant who suggested I go see somebody else because he also thought it was a crap answer.

I should probably go shouldn't I...