Knowing your blood type

Friday morning, I got to work, checked my email, printed some documents to the main printer in the other room, walked to pick up those documents and was greeted not with "Good morning!" or "How are you?" but "What's your blood type?" I hate to admit it, but my answer was "I don't know. But it's written on my blood donor card at the flat. What's going on?"

"The blood bank just called. There's a woman hemorrhaging at UTH [University Teaching Hospital] and they need plasma from someone who's AB+."

We began asking everyone at the project if they knew their blood type. Within a couple hours, since we still hadn't found a match, two representatives from the blood bank showed up to test blood types. Since the AB blood type is even more rare in the Zambian population than in the American population, our expatriate staff quickly lined up to be tested.

At the end of the day, we still hadn't found a match, and, unfortunately, it was likely that it would have been too late for the patient at that point even if we had. Still, the situation reminded me of (1) the importance of knowing one's blood type, (2) the many challenges met in the medical setting of developing countries, and (3) how interlinked ZEHRP is to the medical community of Lusaka.