Married 47 Years, and Still Competing... Over Platelet Donations

By Emma C. Fermo, Red Cross writer

For the last decade, John and Christine Burke have arrived at the American Red Cross donor center in Portland, Maine together. They compare schedules at the kitchen table, pick up Saturday or Sunday, and settle into their chairs side by side for the two-to-three-hour platelet donation. 

It is a routine for the Burkes. It is also, in their telling, a competition.

The competition has stakes now. Christine, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, is temporarily ineligible to donate.

“After you’ve been married for 47 years, everything becomes a competition,” Christine Burke says, “He can’t surpass me in number of units, that's not going to happen.”

John and Christine Burke

The Burkes, who live in Scarborough, did not arrive at platelet donation in a single moment. Their decision to donate, a staggering 400 units collective so far, has surfaced through a multitude of family connections that have quietly accumulated over the years. John, a semiretired physician, has been donating blood since high school. His parents, both O negative blood types, inspired John. His father, donated regularly, and the example -- the simple act of showing up – became something John never thought twice about. 

Christine, a nurse for 48 years, started donating blood as a student. “All of the nursing students would go over and donate blood at the hospital every once in a while,” she said. She kept giving regularly whenever possible.

Platelets, however, came later for the Burkes. 

Christine and John’s youngest son, Dan, who was living in Boston at the time began donating platelets after being asked when donating blood. 

Christine’s brother, who she says, “made John and I feel like two cents looking for change,” after he donated one of his kidneys...

Around the same time, a close friend of the Burkes was diagnosed with leukemia. He needed platelets often throughout his treatment, and the abstraction of platelet donation became suddenly and painfully concrete. 

The Burkes started donating platelets in 2020; partly for him, partly because their son was, partly because it was simply the next thing for a family already oriented toward giving. Their friend eventually lost his battle with leukemia. By then, the Burkes had built platelet donations into the rhythm of their lives.

The Burkes, equipped with a different background from many other donors, shared that they understood the need for platelets and just how precarious the supply is. John has spent his career on the receiving end of platelet orders. John recalls seeing a patient whose count, diminished by chemotherapy and another’s body consuming platelets faster than they could produce. 

“It's not as simple as getting blood,” John says. “You give somebody a couple of units of blood who's lost some blood; they're tanked back up again. But platelets, frequently it's because the platelets are getting consumed, or they're just not producing them at all. So, you need them, and you need them more frequently.”

Platelets, unlike blood, have a shelf life of just five days. They cannot be stockpiled. They cannot be manufactured. The patient who needs them this week needs someone to have given this week.

Christine recalled John's perspective on the issue from his hospital years. “He has often said, ‘You didn't realize when you would say, OK, get me some platelets for this person, how important that was: that somebody be on the other end donating that unit.’ It truly saves lives.”

That awareness sharpens what it means to walk into the donor center and find an empty chair. “I've come in here, and I've been the only one,” John says. “Thinking to myself, ‘OK, well, I'm the only one in this shift. There's somebody that might be needing something that can't get it because of that.’”

For Christine, the past several months have rewritten her relationship to the donor chair: not because she has stopped believing in it, but because she has been told to wait. The diagnosis came suddenly. Her routine mammogram followed by the request for a needle biopsy revealed the fast-growing cancer. 

Christine shares that she does not need chemotherapy, and instead had gone for radiation treatment 15 minutes a day for four weeks.

Just now, Christine feels better, eager to donate again, she says... but rules to donate require a one-year wait after a cancer diagnosis before donating. For Christine, every bit the lawyer she trained to be, has gone over the rules with John.

“I said, ‘I think we should call and check.’ Yeah, that's the lawyer in me. ‘Wait a minute, we need more definition here.’” 

When Christine could not donate, the Red Cross staff at the Portland Donation Center made sure she still felt part of the mission. "They got together the most beautiful care package for me," she said, describing the plant-based gift the team had built after Christine’s diagnosis. “One of the phlebotomists actually knit a blanket for me. Just such a lovely care package. I can't tell you how much I appreciate those wonderful kids there.” 

Christine Burke

Both Burkes describe the donor center less as a clinical setting and more as a community. They know the phlebotomists by their first names. The plebotomists know them. The feeling extends beyond Portland. When the Burkes visit Dan, who has since moved to Nashville, Tennessee, they often arrange to donate at his local center while in town.

“We walked in, and all we heard was, ‘Oh, hey, you’re Dan's parents. Oh, he’s a great guy. We love him too,’” John said. It became, in Christine's words, “his other family down there.”

Both Burkes describe the same feeling after donating, something between satisfaction and quiet relief.

“I always feel better after, and I don't know whether it's partly physiological or psychological,” Christine said, “but that you've just done something is like, OK, I've done a good deed. I can eat my Oreos and pretzels with good conscience.”

John echoed it almost exactly. “I always tell my wife when I finish that I feel better after I donate. I don't think it's anything physiological. I just kind of feel like I've done something... I know somebody needs this, and I'm providing something.”

For Christine, who has built a life on multiple careers: intensive care unit nursing, college health, cosmetic dermatology, law and lobbying... the appeal of platelet donation has a particular shape.

“I think in life you always want to feel as though you've made a difference,” she said. “There are lots of ways you make a difference. I've been a nurse forever. But as you get older, I think you feel less able to help sometimes. And so, this is one of the ways that we can literally help save lives. And nobody even has to know that it was us that did it, which somehow just touches your soul.

“We just want to make sure that we leave the world a better place than it was when we came,” she said.

To learn more about donating platelets with the American Red Cross or to schedule an appointment visit: https://www.redcrossblood.org/giveplatelets.