Are they not a thing here?
It was an emergency situation, and I ended up staying in hospital for ten days. I had to do a lot of explaining to friends and colleagues, and they all reacted in horror. One of them (who has a medical background) even told me that blood transfusions are extremely rare in Japan. I find this difficult to believe.
Can someone give me some background on this?
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Of course blood transfusions are a thing in Japan. They’re places to donate blood everywhere in Tokyo
It’s hard to believe…because it’s not true
Are you sure they didn’t just react in shock (more than horror) that you were so severely ill that you had to get a blood transfusion? And along those lines, it’s certainly “rare” in that most people would go decades without ever needing one.
Somebody you know needing a blood transfusion is extremely rare, fortunately. I’d say this was a communication breakdown.
Japan has excellent medical care, so unless you undergo a difficult surgery or have a car accident, situations requiring blood transfusion are rare. The only people around me, including myself, have never had a blood transfusion from birth to death.
Staying in the hospital for 10 days was probably the shocking part. That does sound serious.
Tis the country where people believe that your blood type determines your personality 🙂
I had one about 3 weeks ago during surgery. The only thing rare was I’m Rh O- and that’s rare outside Japan, they had no trouble sourcing the blood and noone who knew about the surgery has said anything about the transfusion because I was having surgery…
There’s a mass of room for confusion here.
When people donate blood it is normally processed split into its different components, such as plasma, white blood cells, red blood cells, and so on. These each have a specialised use, and the days of simply taking the bag of whole blood from the donation centre and transfusing it into a patient are pretty much over in most developed countries. Whole blood transfusions are extremely rare.
So this may be the first area of confusion. Depending on how you expressed the idea it might have sounded like you got whole blood, as opposed to a single component.
The next area of confusion may be that most modern surgerical techniques actually vacuum up your own blood and (after a quick filtering) put it straight back into you again. This technique has become common because (a) it limits the potential for outside infection, and (b) there are never enough blood donors to meet demand. There are other reasons, but this is a Reddit post, not a medical textbook.
As a result blood transfusions are rare in a surgical environment, and a lot of the blood is used for other things. That you needed outside blood means that you left a lot of yours on the pavement… or your surgeon had a bad day and nicked an artery and your blood is now decorating the walls of an operating room. It isn’t normal to need extra blood, as modern surgical technique normally limit blood loss to within human “normal” ranges.
There are other areas where confusion may have arisen, but the bottom line here is that if you needed a blood transfusion things were … bad. A ten day stay in hospital tends to indicate things were pretty bad, that’s in “recovering from major surgery” territory.
Why would it be an usual thing anywhere. Did you lose a limb or two from a terrible traffic accident, or attack from an axe murderer, or survived a battle in the frontlines of bakhumut? Needing a large amount of blood isn’t something normal people go through in their everyday lives.
Blood transfusions are rare anywhere. It is not something doctors want to do if they can at all help it.
From what my friend told me is they took her blood to put back in her body if she needed it during surgery.
I was immensely confused
I had a blood transfusion a bit over 10 years ago because of blood loss from an emergency cesarean. I stayed at the hospital for a week, as that is the norm for childbirth. They do happen but aren’t happening to everyone all the time, I think that is why it was said to be “rare”, and maybe with no clear experience with gaikoku, the Japanese person that said that they were rare here was just trying to not assume you had any other idea about frequency overall.
I think that in Japan people generally don’t tell each other details of medical procedures that they have.
If anyone is shocked about a blood transfusion maybe they are recalling the [Contaminated blood scandal in Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_blood_scandal_in_Japan?wprov=sfti1) where in the 1980s, between one and two thousand haemophilia patients in Japan contracted HIV via contaminated blood products.