I almost donated ten gallons of blood products

Previous discussion about five gallons here

Sorry for the somewhat clickbaity title, but it's got relevance:

Ever since I hit five gallons last year, I've been donating away, excitedly working towards that ten gallon milestone. I do whole blood donations every eight weeks, and I try to do platelets once a month.

I literally had ONE donation left to get myself to ten gallons when I got a call that nobody, especially no gay man, ever wants to get: the blood tests from my last donation came back as potentially reactive for HIV antibodies.

To say I was tilted would be an understatement. I know that the prognosis for HIV is significantly better than it used to be, but as someone who grew up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, I still had a significant gut reaction. It hit me hard.

After I had time to calm down, however, I was better able to process the information. First, the results were preliminary and not a confirmation. Second, I do not engage in any practices that would risk HIV transmission. My husband and I are mutually monogamous and have been so for the better part of two decades. And the only time I deal with blood is when it's my own and I'm donating. Also, the donation site I use is meticulous about cleanliness and sanitation, so there's no way it could have been from them not following proper protocol.

As such, it was significantly more likely that the test was a false positive than an actual one.

I immediately got myself tested and, sure enough, it came back negative. The Red Cross also did confirmation testing on my blood, which also came back negative. In digging around to find some actual data on this, I found this graph from this page which, if I'm reading it right, shows that they have a 96.2% false positive rate. Pretty high! But, it makes sense: apparently the tests they use are VERY sensitive. They do not want HIV entering the blood supply like it did back during the 80s, so better to trigger more false positives than allow any actual positives to get through.

I got a letter from the Red Cross confirming my negative results, along with bolded text that clearly states:

The Red Cross cannot accept blood from donors who have reactive test results for any infectious disease. This means you are no longer allowed to donate blood for others.

Again, I was devastated. I waited my whole lifetime to be able to donate blood because, as a gay man, I was considered a high risk for HIV and therefore not allowed to. And now, once they finally changed the rules and I finally got the chance to actually do it, I was cut off right as I was just getting the ball rolling -- all because of an incorrect preliminary test result for that very same HIV.

I called the Red Cross to discuss the results and learned that, thankfully, the moratorium is not a lifetime one but only for 6 months (this is mentioned nowhere in the letter, by the way). After that, I'm eligible for re-entry testing, upon which a negative result will clear me and I'll be able to donate again.

Given the incubation time of HIV it is technically a possibility that I do actually have it and it's just not triggering the confirmatory tests yet. However, as previously mentioned, I do literally nothing that would put me at risk for it, so I feel comfortable in saying this was, definitively, a false positive.

The person at the Red Cross did mention that allergies can trigger it, and my previous donation I had done shortly after getting my monthly allergy shots, so it's possible that was why the blood test flagged in the first place.

Unfortunately, this means that instead of hitting my 10 gallon goal this year like I was hoping to, I have to sit on the sidelines for a while and wait it out. A bit of a bummer, but genuinely better than either finding out I actually did have HIV and/or that I was ineligible to ever donate again.