Good morning, I have two separate questions I have been wondering about and thought I'd ask them here. 1) Is it safe/allowable to irradiate a unit of LRBCs more than once? I am almost certain that I read somewhere that you should discard a unit rather than irradiating twice. This makes sense to me as I'd imagine the amount of damage to doubly irradiated cells would be quite high, resulting in an increased amount of potassium and an expiration date that could not be determined. Would these factors matter if the unit was going to be immediately transfused after irradiation? 2) This one may be a no brainer, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something...Is it possible to have an auto-anti-E if you have been previously typed as E negative? I ask because I'm not sure if it is possible to have a partial E or something of that sort. A coworker performed an ABID on a patient with a previous anti-E and showed a 4+ reaction with E positive cells; the patient had a positive autocontrol and positive DAT. The eluate showed a 1+ reaction on the E positive cells. I believe she failed to wash the red cells adequately before eluting, and I cannot find where she recorded the results of her final wash. The only other possibility that I can think of is that the patient may have recieved a transfusion of E positive RBCs at another hospital. Thoughts? Thanks for your input.
