But I will tell you that there was a time, several years ago, when I was a blood donor. However, I wasn’t a very regular or consistent donor. Over the course of two or three years I only donated about six times. Oh, I knew that it was a good thing to do and to tell you the truth I always got a good feeling when I donated blood. Those of you who are donors know the feeling you get as you leave the clinic knowing that you’ve done something really worthwhile. Something valuable that hasn’t even cost you anything. But after a half dozen times I quit going, and I’ll tell you why. It always seemed to be inconvenient. You see, in many cities they’re fortunate in that they have permanent clinics that are open five days a week. But in Welland, where I’m from, we don’t have that luxury so there’s a mobile clinic that comes to town once a month. And in Welland the clinic always came on a Thursday. Well Thursday was my lodge meeting night and that made it inconvenient. Like most people, I had a busy, active life and fitting the blood donor clinic into my schedule was often bit of a hassle, an inconvenience – so I just stopped showing up.

I justified this decision in my own mind in this way: I know a lot of people come to these clinics, I know they hold one every month and I know that they have one in every town. Therefore, it stands to reason that all the blood collected in this Welland clinic is earmarked for the Welland Hospital, and how much blood does one, small local hospital need for a few emergencies and some elective surgeries? I’m sure they’re getting all they need, and even if they’re not, what difference is my one pint every two months going to make?

But what I didn’t know was that: every minute of every day (every sixty seconds) someone in this country needs a blood transfusion. I didn’t know that. What I also didn’t know was that a large portion of the blood collected goes for therapeutic treatments, most specifically to sustain the life of cancer patients. I didn’t know that, but I was about to find out. Because in the fall of 1998 I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia.

I consider myself fortunate in that I had an early diagnosis so I wasn’t really troubled too much at first. I had to take some medication once in awhile and was perhaps a little more fatigued than I should have been, but I was still able to get up and go to work every morning. That is until the morning of January 8th, 2001 because on that morning I suddenly discovered that I was too weak to stand up. I soon found myself in the emergency room of the Welland Hospital where they told me that, among other things, my platelet level was somewhere around the eight to ten thousand mark. Platelets, as you may know, are the cells in your blood that cause it to clot and a normal, healthy level would be somewhere around the two hundred thousand parts per micro-litre mark. So you can see, that with somewhere just under ten thousand, I, for all intents and purposes, didn’t really have any. Well, it seems the Welland hospital didn’t have any either. As it turns out, the shelf life of a unit of platelets is only about five days so it’s not really practical for most hospitals to keep them onsite and I was told that some were being shipped from Hamilton in a taxi.

Eventually my platelets arrived, I was stabilized and then admitted, and although I wasn’t in intensive care, I was put in a private room with a “no visitors” sign on the door. I was very sick and quite susceptible to infection. Without going into any great detail I’ll just tell you that the blood was leaving my body almost as fast as they could put it back in and after about a week of this, the doctor took wife aside and told her to start putting my affairs in order because there wasn’t anything more they could do for me. Well my wife wasn’t prepared to accept this prognosis. She’d heard that there was a great cancer clinic in Hamilton attached to the Henderson Hospital and in fact my sister had just recently been treated there for breast cancer and had nothing but good things to say about the place, so it was decided that I should go there. Now it seems that it’s not that easy to transfer from one hospital system to another, there is, as you might expect, some red tape involved and it was another three days before I was finally loaded into an ambulance and sent to the Henderson Hospital, where I spent the next four weeks on the cancer ward.

This was followed by a full year of chemotherapy. Something of a record I’ve been told, to have chemotherapy for a full year, but during that year I also underwent several other rather unpleasant procedures including five very painful bone marrow biopsies and two surgeries. I had to have my spleen removed because it was in danger of rupturing and I also seemed to have developed something called a spindle-cell tumour. Now this thing managed to attach itself to my rib cage and, as its name implies, was growing and spindling in and around my ribs. By the time it was removed it was about an inch thick and the size of a dinner plate and the operation entailed breaking two ribs and removing my left lung. The danger here was that my platelets were so low that I might not survive the operations, but if I didn’t have the surgeries we would have the same result. I never did find out how much blood and/or platelets were used during these procedures, but I’m sure it must have been several units.

So you can see that 2001 was a very interesting and rather challenging year for me as I was quite sick for most of the time. During that year my wife drove me from Welland to Hamilton a total of ninety-eight times and I became rather well known to the staff as you might expect. It was, as they say, touch and go for awhile and, although he didn’t tell me at the time, my oncologist just recently informed me that he hadn’t really expected me to live and apparently they were all rather surprised when I just kept coming back. So I now maintain that I didn’t die for the simple reason that no one told me that I was expected to. You see, I’ve been married for over thirty-five years now and I learned a long time ago that it’s always best to just do as you’re told – and no one told me to die.

But in all seriousness, the thing that did sustain me through that first very difficult year was the eighty-six transfusions that I received. Now that number is a bit misleading because thirty-one of those transfusions were of platelets, and when you consider that it takes five units of whole blood to produce one of platelets, well, if you do the math you’ll see that I went through two hundred and ten pints of blood in one year. Plus whatever was used during my two surgeries.

I’d like to tell you about the Hematology ward at the Henderson Hospital where you get these transfusions. You enter a room with recliner chairs along the walls, much like the chemotherapy clinic, you sit in one of the chairs and they hook you up to an IV pump. Now that term is a bit misleading also so let me digress here for a moment.

When you come to the blood donor clinic to give blood you will be there for about an hour. There’s the registration, the interview and of course we expect you to stay for coffee and donuts, but the actual donation only takes ten or fifteen minutes. However, they can’t pump it back in that fast. It’s called an IV pump, but it’s really more of a controlled drip, and as such, it takes about two hours to transfuse a pint of blood.

So you can see that with all those transfusions at two hours each, I spent a lot of time in those chairs. I had a lot of time to reflect, to think about things, and one of the things I thought about was this: Here I am, I’m getting all this life sustaining blood, and god bless Tommy Douglas, it’s not costing me anything, but it wouldn’t have cost me anything to give it either. All those times when I could have stopped in at the clinic on my way home from work, before I went out to my lodge meeting. Just once every two months, but I didn’t because it was too inconvenient. I feel bad about that now. I wish I had done more when I could have, and I would like nothing better that to repay all that blood, but it’s too late. I can’t donate blood anymore, but what I can do is ask you to come out to the next Blood Donor Clinic and become regular blood donors.

I know that you’ll never meet any of the people whose lives that you save, but you’ll know they’re out there, and what better feeling can there possibly be than to know that you are actively involved in saving lives? I’m alive today because people just like you took the time to donate their blood. And it’s a fact that fifty percent of Canadians will, at some point in their lives, be in need of a blood transfusion. Whether it be for surgery or, god forbid, cancer treatment, you may very well someday require one or more blood transfusions. Will it be available for you? I hope so. But there’s something that you can do about that right now.

You can make a difference, and it’s in you to give.

Please visit Canadian Blood Services