Monthly Archives: June 2020

World Blood Donor Day

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Blood is what regulates the human body and without blood in our systems, we will not be able to live and breathe. It is thicker than water, and feels a bit sticky. The temperature of blood in the body is 38° C, which is about one degree higher than body temperature. Blood has three important functions:Blood plays an important role in regulating the body’s systems as well as supplying oxygen and nutrients to tissues, removing waste, transporting hormones and other signals throughout the body. Composed of plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, the main function of blood is to regulate the pH of the body and the core body temperature. The amount of blood a person has in his body depends mostly on his size and weight.

Blood is an important resource, both for planned treatments and urgent interventions. It can help patients suffering from life-threatening conditions live longer and with a higher quality of life, and supports complex medical and surgical procedures. Blood is also vital for treating the wounded during emergencies of all kinds (natural disasters, accidents, armed conflicts, etc.) and has an essential, life-saving role in maternal and perinatal care.

There’s no end to the benefits of donating blood for those who need it. Blood is needed to save lives in times of emergencies and to sustain the lives of those with medical conditions, like leukemia, thalassaemia and bleeding disorders, as well as patients who are undergoing major surgeries. For many patients, blood donors are their lifeline. One unit of blood can save three lives!

It turns out that donating blood doesn’t just benefit recipients. There are health benefits for donors, too, on top of the benefits that come from helping others. Donating blood has benefits for your emotional and physical health. According to a report by the Mental Health Foundation, helping others can reduce stress, improve your emotional well-being, benefit your physical health, help get rid of negative feelings as well as provide a sense of belonging and reduce isolation.

For those who have a rare blood group, it is all the more important they donate blood. I am one of those individuals. My blood group is B-ve and I am the only person in my family to have this blood group. In fact, I was so convinced that the result was wrong the first time I did the test to determine thhe blood type, that I did multiple tests to confirm the fact that my group was so different from the rest of my family. B negative is one of the rarest blood groups with around 3-4% of the population having this group. S and the children are O positive and because of this, I had to take multiple injections when I was pregnant so that my body does not reject the children’s positive blood group. I used to donate blood and also had a card from the local Red Cross which stated my blood group and to not do any transfusion if I needed it unless the check the blood which will be transferred into my body, but I lost it when my wallet got nicked some years back. These days, even though I want to, because of my diabetes, I am unable to donate blood. S on the other hand, is an enthusiastic donor and donates multiple times a year.

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Yesterday was World Blood Donor Day. The event serves to raise awareness of the need for safe blood and blood products and to thank blood donors for their life-saving gifts of blood.

A blood service that gives patients access to safe blood and blood products in sufficient quantity is a key component of an effective health system. Ensuring safe and sufficient blood supplies requires the development of a nationally coordinated blood transfusion service based on voluntary non-remunerated blood donations. However, in many countries, blood services face the challenge of making sufficient blood available, while also ensuring its quality and safety.

The need for safe blood is universal. Safe blood is critical both for treatments and urgent interventions. It can help patients suffering from life-threatening conditions live longer and with a higher quality of life and supports complex medical and surgical procedures. Blood is also vital for treating the wounded during emergencies of all kinds (natural disasters, accidents, armed conflicts, etc.) and has an essential, life-saving role in maternal and neonatal care.

But access to safe blood is still a privilege of the few. Most low- and middle-income countries struggle to make safe blood available because donations are low and equipment to test blood is scarce. Globally, 42% of blood is collected in high-income countries, which are home to only 16% of the world’s population.

An adequate supply of safe blood can only be assured through regular donations by voluntary unpaid blood donors. This is why the World Health Assembly in 2005 designated a special day to thank blood donors and encourage more people to give blood freely. World Blood Donor Day takes place every year on 14 June. As well as thanking blood donors, it is a day to raise awareness about the global need for safe blood and how everyone can contribute.

The campaign theme for this year’s World Blood Donor Day is “Safe blood saves lives” with the slogan “Give blood and make the world a healthier place”. The idea is to focus on the contribution an individual giver can make to improve health for others in the community. Blood donations are needed all over the world to ensure individuals and communities have access to safe and quality-assured blood and blood products in both normal and emergency situations. Through the campaign, we call on more people all over the world to become life-savers by volunteering to donate blood regularly.

The objectives of this year’s campaign are to celebrate and thank individuals who donate blood and encourage more people to start donating; to raise wider awareness of the urgent need to increase the availability of safe blood for use wherever and whenever it is needed to save life; to demonstrate the need for universal access to safe blood transfusion and provide advocacy on its role in the provision of effective health care and in achieving universal health coverage; and to mobilise support at national, regional and global levels among governments and development partners to invest in, strengthen and sustain national blood programmes.

The day and the theme are also a call to action for governments, national health authorities and national blood transfusion services to provide adequate resources and put in place systems and infrastructures to increase the collection of blood from voluntary, non-remunerated blood donors; to provide quality donor care; to promote and implement appropriate clinical use of blood; and to set up systems for the oversight and surveillance on the whole chain of blood transfusion.

Are you a blood donor, if yes, here’s a huge shoutout to you and if no, please consider giving some blood to someone who needs it, if you are physically able to.

2020 Week 24 Update

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I am fed up!

It’s been almost three months of being cooped up at home and there are times it really gets to me. At least twice or thrice a week, when I wake up in the morning, it takes me a few seconds of thinking to figure out which day of the week it is. Though we can get out of the house to shop or walk, I don’t get out unless it is absolutely necessary. Because of my pre-exisiting condition, I am already immunocompromised and if I get the virus, it may prove deadly.

Singapore’s positive count as of yesterday has crossed 40,000 cases, though most of the cases are from the workers in dormitories. We are averaging about 400-500 cases on a daily basis, and I am looking forward to a day when this number comes down to a low double digit.

This week, New Zealand became  the first country to officially declare themselves COVID free and they have zero positive cases currently. This is such good news and we are all cheering the country and hope this news gets replicated worldwide and soon.

In India, on the other hand, cases are only increasing. The current tally for the country is around 310,000 and India is now number four with the highest number of cases, behind the USA, Brazil and Russia. My home state of Maharashtra leads the country in the number of cases with more than 101,000 cases and accounting for around 32% of all of cases in India. My hometown of Mumbai is the worst hit city in the country with more than 55,000 positive cases and if you add the nearby city of Thane which is usually clubbed as metropolitian Mumabai,the total increases to about 71,000 with more than 2,000 deaths. Subarban Mumbai along with Thane and together with Delhi, Ahmedabad and Chennai, these cities account for more than half of India’s COVID tally.

BB went back to school this week for some lab work and I think he will be going back at least once a week for more of lab time since that is something you can’t do as home based learning. GG on the other hand, has no need to go to school, so she is at home only. They both also had tests or assessments this past few weeks. As per their personalities, GG panicked and was wondering if she wrote the right answer or not while BB was more blase about this. They are on leave now and school for BB will start the week after next and after two weeks for GG.

Well, this was our week, have a great week people and remember, stay safe, stay sanitised and stay home!

In My Hands Today…

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Walking on the Ceiling – Aysegül Savas

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After her mother’s death, Nunu moves from Istanbul to a small apartment in Paris. One day outside of a bookstore, she meets M., an older British writer whose novels about Istanbul Nunu has always admired. They find themselves walking the streets of Paris and talking late into the night. What follows is an unusual friendship of eccentric correspondence and long walks around the city.

M. is working on a new novel set in Turkey and Nunu tells him about her family, hoping to impress and inspire him. She recounts the idyllic landscapes of her past, mythical family meals, and her elaborate childhood games. As she does so, she also begins to confront her mother’s silence and anger, her father’s death, and the growing unrest in Istanbul. Their intimacy deepens, so does Nunu’s fear of revealing too much to M. and of giving too much of herself and her Istanbul away. Most of all, she fears that she will have to face her own guilt about her mother and the narratives she’s told to protect herself from her memories.

Synchronicity: Everyday Magic?

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“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see”

– Carl Jung

There are times in your life when suddenly you see something popping up repeatedly in your life. For me this is in the form of multiple numbers. In any given week, I see numbers being repeated. This will be in the form of time where I will see time like 11:11 or 1:11 or 4:44 or even 5:55. Or maybe when I am reading book, online or offline and when I glance at the page number, it will show a double number like 44, 55 or even 77 or 99! I got curious about these coincidences and this is what I learnt.

When you notice the same coincidence happening more than once and it begins to take on meaning, then it becomes a Synchronicity. This type of serendipity can seem startling and mysterious when it happens often enough. Everyone has experienced these ‘meaningful coincidences’ in their life, but many don’t always pay attention to the meaning of the synchronicity itself, or realize how it came about in the first place. It is believed by many that this continued coincidence is a nudge from the universe telling you to go in a certain direction or maybe reassuring you that you on the right track, perhaps you are grappling with a decision and such coincidences show you the path to take?

A growing number of people believe that synchronicity is like a powerful ‘wink’ from the Universe telling us that yes, we’re on the right track. Synchronicity is also believed to be a form of guidance from the Higher Self; a way of showing you where to go and what to do next in your life as you proceed through your spiritual awakening.

Synchrocity is different from Serendipity. Serendipity is defined as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way, while synchrocity is a series of events which are symbolic in nature and which point out to something happening or going to happen in your life.

A concept first introduced by the analytical psychologist Carl Jung, synchronicity is defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection”. He says such events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. According to Jung, synchronicity is an “acausal connecting (togetherness) principle,” “meaningful coincidence”, “acausal parallelism” or “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved”. He introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture.

Synchronicity is considered pseudoscience because it is neither testable nor falsifiable. Mainstream science explains synchronicities as mere coincidences or spurious correlations which can be described by laws of statistics and confirmation biases.

According to Jung’s 1960 book, “Résumé”, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time can take three forms:
a) The coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.
b) The coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a “synchronistic,” objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.
c) The same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.

For subjects like synchronicity, there will be skepctics who say that it’s all coincidence, chalking it up to what’s called “confirmation bias,” which is our very real tendency to remember our ‘hits,’ and forget our ‘misses’. They also point out to the fact that all experiences you hear from people about synchronicity are anecdotal, which means it’s a personal experience, something that happened only to them and can’t be replicated. But if you think about it, most of our experiences in life, spiritual or material are personal and what you experience and undergo may not be the same as someone in the same situation.

It is not very difficult to develop the ability to have synchronicity in your life. You need to be aware and have an open and receptive mind which pays attention to the now and present. Also be humble and don’t impose your desires on your experiences. Trust in yourself and the fact the universe will show synchronicity in your life. Lastly, listen to what your instincts tell you. Sometimes, and this is something I struggle with all the time, we tend to dismiss what our instincts tell us and instead use our mind and practicalities to make a decision. When this happens, when I have a disconnect between my mind and my heart and I let my mind win, I always regret it because my instincts were spot on. Our unconscious mind is vast and very wise and when we listen to our instincts, doors open and things happen for the better.

So the next time such coincidences happen in your life, don’t dismiss them. Stop and think and if you have a battle between your practical mind and your instincts, give the instinct a chance, you will be pleasantly surprised!

Have you had instances of synchronicity happen to you? Do comment and share it with me, I’d love to hear all about it!

In My Hands Today…

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton – Sara Collins

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All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being held in the Old Bailey.

The testimonies against Frannie are damning. She is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, a whore.

But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even if remembering could save her life. She doesn’t know how she came to be covered in the victims’ blood. But she does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who stretched all bounds of ethics, and the events that brought her into the Benhams’ London home—and into a passionate and forbidden relationship.

Though her testimony may seal her conviction, the truth will unmask the perpetrators of crimes far beyond murder and indict the whole of English society itself.