My friend Sarah fainted at her own wedding.
Not from nerves or tight corsets or the overwhelming emotion of the moment. She fainted because she'd been so anxious about fitting into her dress that she'd barely eaten or drunk anything for two days. Her blood pressure dropped. Her brain didn't get enough oxygen. And down she went, right there at the altar, saved from a concussion only by her very alert maid of honor.
The paramedics gave her IV fluids. Saline solution—basically salt water. Within twenty minutes, she was fine. Color back in her cheeks. Standing on her own. Married an hour later with a funny story that'll get told at every anniversary.
What saved her wasn't complicated medicine. It was volume. Her body needed more liquid in her circulatory system, and once it had that, everything else clicked back into place.
That liquid? Most of it becomes plasma. Pale yellow, mostly water, completely unglamorous plasma.
And I've been thinking about it ever since.
The Thing We Never Notice
Plasma is the majority shareholder in your blood—55% of every drop flowing through your veins right now. But it's the silent partner. The red blood cells get all the glory, looking dramatic and oxygen-carrying. The white blood cells are the action heroes, fighting infections. Platelets are the emergency response team, clotting wounds.
And plasma? Plasma is the water they all swim in.
Except that's like saying the ocean is just the water fish swim in. Technically true. Profoundly incomplete.
Plasma is the courier service, the transit system, the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. It carries nutrients from your last meal to cells in your toes. It transports hormones—chemical messages from your thyroid, your pancreas, your ovaries or testicles—to exactly where they need to go. It hauls waste products to your kidneys and liver for disposal.
It regulates your body temperature, distributing heat when you're warm, conserving it when you're cold. It maintains the pH balance that keeps every enzymatic reaction in your body functioning correctly. It carries antibodies, proteins, clotting factors, electrolytes.
Remove plasma from blood and you don't have blood anymore. You have a handful of cells with nowhere to go and no way to communicate.
But we barely think about it. It's just... there. The background. The substrate. Easy to overlook.
Just like a lot of essential things in life.
The Body's Economy
Here's what plasma taught me about infrastructure: you don't notice it until it fails.
When Sarah's plasma volume dropped—from dehydration, from not eating—suddenly nothing worked right. Her heart raced trying to pump insufficient fluid through her vessels. Her blood pressure plummeted. Her brain started shutting down non-essential functions to conserve resources.
It wasn't dramatic. It was mechanical. The delivery system failed, so deliveries stopped arriving.
I think about cities like this now. Roads, water lines, electrical grids—invisible until they break. The people who maintain them, overlooked until they strike. The systems we depend on utterly while acknowledging barely.
Plasma is the infrastructure of your body. And just like roads and bridges, it requires maintenance. Water. Nutrition. Electrolytes. Rest.
Skip the maintenance long enough, and you'll find out exactly how much you took it for granted.
Sarah learned this in front of 150 wedding guests. Most of us learn it more privately. But we all learn it eventually.
The Generosity Written Into You
Here's the part that gets me: your body makes extra plasma. On purpose. Abundantly.
You could donate plasma right now—have a machine pull out a liter or so—and your body would replace it within 48 hours. You wouldn't even notice the difference after the first few hours. Your bone marrow would just... make more. Your liver would synthesize more proteins. Your kidneys would adjust the balance.
You are walking around with renewable life inside you.
And we've figured out how to share it. Plasma donation is elegantly simple: sit in a chair, let a machine separate your plasma from your red cells, give the plasma away, get your cells back. An hour later you're done.
That plasma becomes medicine. Immunoglobulin therapies for people with immune deficiencies. Albumin for burn victims and trauma patients. Clotting factors for hemophiliacs. Treatments for rare diseases I can't pronounce.
One donation can help three or four people. Regular donors—people who give every few weeks—create a steady stream of healing for strangers they'll never meet.
There's something quietly miraculous about that. Your body makes something so abundant that you can literally give it away, repeatedly, and never run out.
It's generosity encoded into biology.
When the River Turns Against You
But plasma isn't always benign. Sometimes it becomes the problem.
My uncle has lupus. His immune system can't distinguish friend from foe anymore, so it attacks his own tissues. The antibodies doing the attacking? They travel through his plasma. The very system that should nourish his cells instead carries weapons against them.
Treatment involves plasmapheresis—filtering his blood, removing the plasma with its confused antibodies, replacing it with donor plasma or synthetic alternatives. Essentially, changing out the liquid his cells live in.
He describes it as strange. Watching his blood leave his body, get filtered, come back. Knowing that the thing keeping him alive is also attacking him. That he needs plasma to survive but his own plasma is trying to kill him.
The vulnerability of that stops me cold. How fragile the balance is. How something as simple as liquid—water, proteins, a few dissolved substances—can be the difference between health and illness, between life and whatever comes after.
The Marketplace We Don't Talk About
Let me be honest about the uncomfortable part: plasma is bought and sold.
Unlike whole blood, which is almost entirely donated voluntarily in most countries, plasma collection is often compensated. There's an entire industry built around it. Collection centers in economically struggling areas. People lining up twice a week because the $50 or $100 helps pay rent or buy groceries.
Some people call it exploitation. The poor selling their bodies—or at least their body fluids—to survive, while pharmaceutical companies turn that plasma into medications that cost thousands of dollars per dose.
Others call it fair exchange. Your time, your mild discomfort, compensated reasonably. Your plasma genuinely saves lives. Why shouldn't you be paid?
I don't know where I land on this. Maybe both things are true. Maybe it can be altruistic and transactional, empowering and exploitative, ethical and problematic all at once.
What I do know is this: the people donating plasma in strip mall collection centers are keeping other people alive. Whether they're doing it for money or altruism or both doesn't change that fact.
The motivation doesn't diminish the gift.
What Plasma Remembers
Here's something I learned that changed how I think about my own body: your plasma has memory.
Not consciousness. Not awareness. But history.
Every illness you've fought, every vaccine you've received—the antibodies are still there, floating in your plasma. It's a liquid archive of your immune encounters. That flu you had in college. The chickenpox from childhood. The tetanus shot after you stepped on a nail. The COVID vaccine series.
Your plasma remembers all of it.
When you donate plasma, you're not giving generic fluid. You're giving your immunological autobiography. If you've recently recovered from an infection, your plasma carries antibodies that might protect someone currently fighting that same disease.
Your experience becomes their defense.
There's something profound about that. We talk about learning from others' experiences, building on the knowledge of those who came before us. But plasma donation is literal transfer of survival wisdom. Your body teaching someone else's body what you already learned.
It's inheritance on a molecular level.
The Invisibility of Maintenance
I think the biggest lesson plasma taught me is about the things we overlook.
Your body is making plasma right now. Your bone marrow is producing albumin. Your liver is synthesizing clotting factors. Your kidneys are regulating the electrolyte balance. None of this requires your conscious attention. It just happens.
You woke up this morning and plasma was already there, flowing through roughly 60,000 miles of blood vessels, doing its unglamorous work. Maintaining pH. Distributing nutrients. Transporting hormones. Standing ready to clot if you get a paper cut.
You didn't ask for this. You don't have to manage it. Your body just... does it.
Until it doesn't. Until dehydration or illness or age or injury disrupts the system. And then suddenly you notice. Suddenly it matters.
How much of life is like that? How many people maintain systems we depend on? How many processes run in the background, essential but invisible?
The janitor who cleans the office overnight. The person who maintains the water treatment plant. The parent who does the invisible labor of keeping a household functioning. The friend who always shows up but never demands attention.
All the plasma of our lives. Overlooked until absent.
The Pale Yellow Truth
I keep coming back to Sarah's wedding. How close she came to real harm from something so preventable. How simple the fix was—just fluids, just volume, just giving her body what it needed to maintain its systems.
Sometimes I think we're all a little like that. Running on empty, ignoring basic needs, pushing through until something breaks. Acting like we can function without maintenance, without rest, without the fundamental stuff that keeps our systems running.
Your body knows better. It's constantly trying to maintain balance—producing plasma, regulating temperature, fighting infections, healing wounds. Working to keep you alive even when you're not paying attention, even when you're actively making its job harder.
The least we can do is notice. Drink water. Rest occasionally. Maybe donate plasma if you can—give away some of that abundance your body makes anyway.
And maybe, just maybe, start noticing the plasma in our lives. The unglamorous, essential, background things that make everything else possible.
The infrastructure. The maintenance. The quiet, constant work of keeping systems running.
It's not dramatic. It won't make headlines. It's just pale yellow fluid flowing through your veins.
But remove it, and everything stops.
Sarah knows that now. She drinks water before big events. She eats regularly no matter how tight the dress. She learned the hard way that you can't run on empty, no matter how much you want to.
Her body taught her something simple, something profound: the invisible things matter most.
The plasma flows.
It always has.
And if we're lucky—if we pay attention, if we maintain, if we appreciate—it always will.#plasma @Plasma $XPL
