Before the nurse poked me with a needle, she had to ask me a few questions. In her hand was a questionaire with questions like, "Have you had sex with another man after 1977?" and "Have you ever swapped needles with some one who may have had sex with a baboon?".
I flunked the test on the very first question: "Have you had jaundice after the age of 11?," asked the nurse impatient to get through the questions and on with siphoning off my blood.
"Yes," I replied, "about five years ago." She was so shocked that she dropped her pen. "H-how come?," she stammered, pulling her chair back in fright.
The nurse's fearful antics not withstanding, jaundice is decidedly pedestrian in India -- it won't even buy you a sweetheart's sympathy (I know, I tried). It must be because most people have contracted jaundice once and (consequently) developed immunity to it that the presence of Hepatitis-B antibodies doesn't faze blood agencies there.
Returning to work, undiluted blood coursing through my veins, I was struck with a thought: do you think she might have burned the forms I'd filled out and fumigated the chair I was sitting on just in case?
