In Their Own Words: How Blood Donation Saved My Life
By Rachel Victer, blood recipient
You never know what life will throw at you. You may not ever think you’ll ever be in any kind of a life-or-death situation where you’ll need to receive a blood transfusion. I learned that first-hand when one chilly night in December of 2012, I went to bed feeling just fine to ending up in a hospital room near-death the next day.
It all started after an evening of celebrating the Christmas
holiday with a local women’s business group I belonged to. Little did I know
that at some point in the early morning hours, an undetected cyst on my right
ovary ruptured, and I was slowly starting to bleed to death.
I was at home alone with my young son who was almost two years old at the time. My husband Roger was teaching at the university 20 minutes away. After feeling badly all morning, I thought maybe I had a touch of food poisoning from seafood I had eaten at dinner the night before. It wasn’t food poisoning. By the time I was able to reach Roger, I was in in excruciating pain, frantic, and unable to walk. He rushed me to the hospital. When hospital staff conducted an ultrasound, it was so cloudy from blood, they couldn’t see what was going on. Moments later I was getting prepped for emergency surgery.
As I’m getting prepped for surgery, I find myself looking
into the sympathetic eyes of an anesthesiologist who couldn’t give me a
straight answer when I asked him if I was going to be okay. The fact I was being
wheeled into emergency surgery was simply surreal.
Hours later I woke up to the soft beep-beeps of hospital monitoring equipment.
I felt completely drained and was hooked up to an array of wires. My surgeon told me that my blood loss was so severe that I needed to have multiple blood transfusions, otherwise I would have died on the operating table. I had children I adored. I had a husband I was madly in love with. I was in graduate school with a bright future ahead and at that moment, I had needed blood and I was alive because that blood was there for me.Remembering that moment in retrospect has made me pause and
think. We are all connected in one way or another. Most of us know at least one
person who has had a blood transfusion. One day that person could be you. If no
one gave blood, people like me wouldn’t be here. In a sense, I feel that that
giving blood actually saved my life. We’re truly all connected, so give blood
if you can. It may save your own life.
If you'd like to learn more about blood donation, visit: www.RedCrossBlood.org.
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