There's a peculiar intimacy in the act of bleeding. A paper cut, a scraped knee, a blood draw at the doctor's office—these moments reveal something that's supposed to stay hidden, and we react with instinctive unease. But here's what almost no one realizes: the blood you see, that vivid crimson that makes you wince or feel faint, is only half the story. The other half is invisible in the mess, camouflaged by the red cells that grab all the attention. That other half is plasma, and it's been keeping you alive in ways you've never imagined.
I learned this not in a biology classroom but in a hospital room, watching a bag of pale amber liquid drip into my father's arm. "Plasma," the nurse said when I asked. It looked like watered-down apple juice, almost offensively mundane for something being transfused into a human body. I expected her to say it was saline, or glucose, or some synthesized pharmaceutical.
"It's from donors," she continued. "Four different people, actually. Their plasma, keeping him stable."
Four strangers were flowing through my father's veins. Four people who had sat in donation chairs, probably scrolling through their phones, probably thinking about dinner, while their bodies gave away something they'd never miss and he desperately needed. That's when plasma stopped being an abstract concept from high school biology and became something else entirely: a quiet form of communion.
The Part of You That's Mostly Someone Else
If you think of yourself as a solid, coherent individual, plasma complicates that story. Your body is approximately 60% water, and about five liters of that water is currently moving through your blood vessels as plasma. But that's not really your water in any meaningful sense. The water molecules in your plasma right now weren't there a week ago. They came from coffee, from soup, from the glass of water you drank this morning without thinking about it. They'll be gone tomorrow, exhaled or urinated or sweated out, replaced by new water that you'll consume without ceremony.
The proteins dissolved in that water tell a different story—one that's profoundly, intimately yours. Your liver has been manufacturing albumin since before you were born, pumping out this crucial protein that keeps fluid from leaking out of your blood vessels. Your immune system has been building antibodies your entire life, adding a new entry to plasma's defensive library every time you've encountered a pathogen: that cold in third grade, the flu shot last fall, the stomach bug you got from your coworker's kid.
Your plasma is a liquid autobiography. Everything you've eaten, every infection you've survived, every medication you've taken, every moment of stress or joy—all of it leaves traces in the pale gold fluid moving through you right now. If someone could read plasma the way archaeologists read soil layers, they could reconstruct your history: the coffee from this morning, the antibiotic from last month, the cortisol spike from yesterday's argument, the antibodies from chickenpox thirty years ago.
You are not a fixed thing but a process, and plasma is the medium in which that process occurs.
The Loneliness of Cells
I think about my cells sometimes, which I know is strange, but bear with me.
Each cell in your body is fundamentally alone. Your neurons can't walk over to your muscle cells for a chat. Your stomach cells can't phone your pancreas with requests. They're isolated islands in a dark sea, separated by distances that, on a cellular scale, might as well be miles. They can't leave their posts. They can't go searching for food or water. They can't eliminate their own waste.
This is where plasma becomes less like plumbing and more like love.
Plasma is what connects the disconnected. It's the conversation between distant parts of yourself. When your muscles need glucose, they can't shout across the body to your liver—but they can release chemical signals into plasma that drift to the liver like messages in bottles, and the liver responds by releasing glucose back into that same golden stream. When your thyroid needs to tell your entire body to speed up or slow down, it whispers to plasma, which carries those whispered instructions to every cell that needs to hear them.
Your cells would die of loneliness without it. Not metaphorically—literally. They'd starve, suffocate, drown in their own waste, all while surrounded by a body full of resources they couldn't access. Plasma is what transforms a collection of isolated cells into a community, a conversation, a living whole.
This is why severe dehydration feels like falling apart. Because you are, in fact, falling apart—the communication network that makes you "you" is degrading, messages aren't getting through, the community is dissolving into isolation.
The Gift You Didn't Know You Could Give
My father needed plasma because his liver, damaged by disease, had stopped manufacturing the clotting factors that prevent bleeding. Without them, the smallest injury could become catastrophic. His own plasma had become incomplete, missing critical sentences in the chemical conversation his body needed to have with itself.
So strangers completed those sentences for him.
This is what haunts me beautifully about plasma donation: the sheer intimacy of it. When you donate plasma, you're giving away pieces of your history, your immunity, your body's learned wisdom. The antibodies you've built over a lifetime of surviving infections flow into someone who needs them. The albumin your liver made last week stabilizes a trauma victim's blood pressure. The clotting factors you never consciously think about stop someone else from bleeding to death.
You can donate plasma every few weeks because your body treats it as replaceable—which, chemically, it is. Your liver will make more albumin. Your immune system will replicate those antibodies. Within 48 hours, you'll have regenerated what you gave away. But to the recipient, it's irreplaceable. It's the difference between their cells communicating and falling silent. Between their blood clotting and not. Between living and not.
The transaction is absurdly unequal. You sit in a chair for an hour, maybe feel slightly tired afterward, drink some juice, and go home. Someone else gets to keep existing.
The River That Forgets Nothing
There's a concept in psychology called "somatic memory"—the idea that our bodies remember traumas our minds have forgotten. I think plasma is the physical manifestation of that idea. Every stress hormone surge, every inflammatory response, every immune activation leaves traces in the chemical composition of your plasma. Long after you've consciously forgotten the illness or injury or crisis, your plasma carries markers of it: elevated baseline inflammation, altered protein ratios, antibodies standing watch against invaders that might return.
When researchers analyze plasma from people with PTSD, they find different protein signatures than in plasma from people without it. Chronic stress rewrites the chemical story your plasma tells. So does chronic pain, chronic illness, chronic joy. Your plasma isn't just transporting materials—it's recording your life in a language written in proteins and hormones and metabolites.
This means the plasma moving through you right now is not neutral or blank. It's the accumulated conversation your body has been having with the world since the day you were born. It's every meal, every infection, every heartbreak translated into chemistry. It's proof that nothing really leaves us completely, that we're always carrying our histories inside us, dissolved and flowing.
What We Owe the River
My father survived that hospitalization, though his liver never fully recovered. For months afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about those four plasma donors. I wanted to thank them, but they were anonymous by design. The system protects both donor and recipient from the weight of that intimacy—maybe because if we truly understood what we were giving and receiving, it would be too much to bear.
I started donating plasma myself, not out of obligation but out of something more like gratitude, or maybe humility. Once you understand what plasma does—how it holds you together, keeps you connected to yourself, makes the impossible logistics of being alive actually work—you can't unsee it.
Now when I sit in the donation chair, watching that pale amber liquid pull away from my blood and flow into a collection bag, I think about the fact that I'm giving away my history, my immunity, my body's learned wisdom, and it will become part of someone else's story. Some stranger I'll never meet will have my antibodies flowing through them, my proteins stabilizing their blood pressure, my clotting factors sealing their wounds.
We'll share plasma, which means we'll share, for a brief time, the same chemical conversation. Parts of me will become parts of them. The boundary between us will blur in the most literal sense possible.
This is what plasma has taught me: that the borders we imagine between ourselves and others are more permeable than we think. That we're already flowing into each other in invisible ways. That the river running through you right now connects you to every person you've ever touched, every meal you've ever eaten, every place you've ever been, every version of yourself you've ever been.#plasma @Plasma $XPL
