Has anyone seen my cherry?

**Warning – not intended for the faint of stomach.

I donated blood yesterday. It’s usually an uneventful exercise. Yesterday however, was worthy of a blog entry. To set the scene our nurse was a fabulously animated woman with minimal experience wielding a needle. This happens now and them, and should cause no hard feelings towards the nurse. I happen to have this deceptively accessible looking vein in my arm. Sticking a needle into it seems to have one of two outcomes. Either I feel absolutely nothing, or it feels like they’ve run the bloody needle all the way through my arm.

But this isn’t about me. Well, not yet. The dainty first timer donating next to me didn’t handle the nurse’s thrust & wiggle... thrust & wiggle, as well as I did. She first became a little faint, then nauseous, and then I saw what I have never seen in my life. They gave this girl, who happened to have her head adjacent to my feet, a see through plastic container to use in case of stomach expulsion. I was trying to read my book, but when the poor dear began filling the see through container, I got distracted. It was like watching a fucking train wreck. After convincing myself of the girl’s love of PB & J on white bread with the crusts cut off, my mind began to wander.

I couldn’t remember the last time I saw someone hurl. Neglecting of course myself and the wife, since she wouldn’t let me talk about it even if she had thrown up, I just couldn’t remember the last time. The staff started rushing me through the donation process for fear of a chain reaction. I tried to assure them I was fine. I mean, you just can’t live in a fraternity environment for 5 years, and not get a little vomit on your shoes. It just goes with the territory.

My freshman year of college I lived in an all men’s dorm that was far more like a stereotypical fraternity than my actual fraternity. The Dorm had a penal system. Basically, upperclassmen could make lower classmen drink or eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The existence of this system is a true testament to the stupidity that follows every traditional man-child to college. For one day each year, Champagne Day, this hierarchy was reversed. The end result was that from 8am to 5pm on the first Wednesday after spring break, every freshman in the dorm spent the day tracking down upperclassmen, armed with tequila and pickled pigs feet. It was a glorious event that ran annually for over a decade. Thankfully the school kicked us all out of the dorm and turned it coed before any one got killed.

At 5 o’clock the tables turned back, and we all went to dinner together. We would work it out with the cafeteria to always serve spaghetti on Champagne Day, because let’s face it, what’s more fun to throw up than spaghetti? Each year about a half dozen guys would swallow a cherry tomato whole, in hopes of finding it later in the evening. If it came back up whole, it was deemed to still be edible, and could be ‘gifted’ to any underclassmen that might have been particularly harsh in their execution of the day’s vengeance. The second time down it had to be chewed properly for all to see. For me personally, I would have to say that there is nothing more vile than chugging a bottle of pink champagne while standing in front of a 50 gallon garbage can nearly half full of already eaten spaghetti, but then again, no one over gave me a magic cherry to chew on.

“Hey, you’re done. Are you alright?” The nurse interrupted my thought.

“huh?”

“You kind of zoned out there.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Something just reminded me of cherry tomatoes.”

“Tomatoes...?”

“I’m certain you’d rather not know. I think I'll go eat some cookies now.”