Donating Plasma is...

The coolest thing. I started donating plasma at BioLife in Findlay a few months after I turned 18, and it was a great decision. First of all, what is plasma? Plasma is defined as; the colorless fluid part of blood, lymph, or milk, in which corpuscles or fat globules are suspended. What does it do/Why is it important? The primary purpose of plasma is to transport nutrients to parts of the body that needs it. Donating plasma, like blood, saves lives; it  is used to produce therapies that treat people with rare, chronic diseases and disorders such as primary immunodeficiency, hemophilia and a genetic lung disease, as well as in the treatment of trauma, burns and shock. Besides being important in the sense of saving people, it's also super cool. They hook you up to a machine that sucks your blood up into  a centrifuge, where it separates the plasma from the blood. The plasma it emptied into a special bag, and the blood is emptied into a small well. When the well of blood gets to a certain point the machine stops sucking blood out of your arm and reverses the process. The well of blood empties back into the same tube it originated and is returned to your body. This process is repeated until the bag of plasma is full. Then they pump a bag of saline solution to "replace" the lost plasma. After donating; they remove the needle, tape up you arm, and send you on your way.

What they don't tell you when you donate is:

1) how cool it is to watch the machines.

2) that it feels crazy cool when you can feel your blood in the tube taped against your arm.

3) how its even cooler that you can feel the warmth of your exiting blood and coolness of the returning blood.

4) that at the end when they pump the saline solution into you, its freezing and it feels like your core is ice for a while after the donation. 

Those are all things that I experience when I donate, so it may be different for you. Overall, the entire process is cool and definitely worth it. I have only ever had one not so pleasant experience donating plasma, but that was just because my veins "are small and hard to find sometimes". So, if you enjoy saving lives, watching machines separate your blood from your plasma, or just like laying on a hospital type bed getting holes poked in you; I recommend donating plasma.