Canadian Blood Services has issued an urgent call for blood donations in hopes of topping up its blood supply by the end of this weekend.
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The blood agency says that after a particularly challenging winter this year across much of the country, the agency needs 10,000 Canadians to schedule a donation appointment soon to top up supplies.
“We’ve had an increase in donations across Canada since Feb. 20, when we urged 35,000 new and returning donors to give blood,” Rick Prinzen, Canadian Blood Services’ chief supply chain officer, said in a statement earlier this week.
“We’re pleased collections in many areas have improved, but… with less than a week to go in our urgent call for blood donors, we still have thousands of open appointments to donate blood,” he says.
Celia Missios is one of those urging those who are eligible to donate to make an appointment soon. If not for blood donors, Missios likely wouldn’t be alive today.
In late October, 2006, Missios was hit by a driver who didn’t see her crossing a busy street and drove straight into her. Witnesses later told her she was thrown 5 metres through the air and landed on her neck.
“I was forever changed at that moment,” she told CTV’s Your Morning.
Among the injuries Missios sustained from the impact were a ruptured diaphragm, a lacerated liver, and a crushed pelvis. Though doctors didn’t expect Missios to survive, they performed numerous surgeries to repair the damage – surgeries that required extensive blood transfusions.
“I am told they stopped counting at 54 units of blood,” she said.
Missios later developed sepsis, a life-threatening response to an infection, but pulled through thanks in part to all the fresh red blood cells she had received from donated blood.
Aary Dinh-Ali is someone else who is alive today only because of donated blood.
In 2015, the now-12-year-old was diagnosed with a rare condition called aplastic anemia.
His mother Jenny says it was a dentist who realized something was wrong with her son when he was assessed for excessive gum bleeding. That dentist told Jenny to take her son straight to Sick Kids Hospital, where blood tests revealed he needed a blood transfusion straight away.
“That was the first of nearly 100 transfusions,” Jenny Dinh-Ali said. “Basically, his body fails to produce the blood cells needed to function and needed to live.”
The incurable condition leaves Dinh-Ali with a deficiency of red blood cells, which transport oxygen, white blood cells, which fight infections, and platelets, which are key to the clotting needed to stop bleeding.
Aary says his condition leaves him vulnerable, so he has to take precautions to avoid injuries and infections.
“Once I realized this is my life now, I have to live like this, I adapted to it over some time,” he said.
Dinh-Ali says he wants Canadians to roll up their sleeves and donate to help kids like him.
“There are more people like me who need blood and it can basically give them a new chance to live,” he said.
Half of all Canadians will either need blood, or knows someone who will need blood at some point in their lives. While Canadians are some of the most loyal blood donors in the world, donating twice a year on average, only four per cent of Canadians who are eligible to donate actually do.
“We need more because it gives people back a child, their friends and their loved ones and people in the community,” says Missios.
Anyone over the age of 17 can donate blood, and there is no upper age limit. To find out if you are eligible, Canadian Blood Services offers a simple quiz on their website.
