How Can You Help Evie? Donate Blood! Please.

Need a great goal or New Year's Resolution?  Look no further. Make an appointment with your local blood bank! While Evie was in the hospital, she received whole blood, plasma, and platelets -- without which she would not be alive today. Gratefully, A healthy donor can donate:

• Whole blood as often as 6.5 times per year--every 8 weeks.
• Plasma as often as 13 times per year--every 4 weeks.
• Platelets every 8 days, with a limit of 24 times per year.

Someone Evie's size has about 83 ml's of blood per kilogram in their body. When Evie was hospitalized last year she weighed 21 kilograms (46 lbs). That means her body contained a grand total of approximately 1.75 liters of blood.

When you donate blood, you typically provide one pint, or 473 milliliters. Roughly half of this volume makes it to the end recipient. In her first four weeks in the hospital, Evie was given 3 units of platelets, 5 units of plasma (actually much more counting plasmapheresis treatments), and 19 units of whole blood. By the time she was discharged, she'd had over 30 units of blood transfused. The volume of each transfusion varies, but you can count on each one containing at least 250 milliliters. That means every drop of blood in Evie's body was replaced more than 4 times. She'd be dead without donors.

Evie was hospitalized in December 2012 with a severe case of Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS) and suffered many serious complications. Here she is pictured while undergoing dialysis on a day where she required 4 whole blood transfusions, effectively replacing over 50% of her total blood volume in less than 24 hours. Shortly after these lifesaving transfusions she became stable enough to undergo a procedure where the surgeon discovered a damaged branch of her inferior mesonteric artery (IMA) which was then embolized to stop the bleeding.

Today Evie is excitedly anticipating a kidney transplant thanks to dedicated blood donors. Her daddy has a goal to donate enough blood to replenish the bloodbank from what Evie required. We're going to call this "Evie's Challenge: 5 years, 4 gallons, for Evie" (our metric friends can call it: Evie's Challenge: 5 years, 15 Liters, for Evie)

It will take 5 years faithfully donating every 8 weeks. Will you join him? Take up Evie's challenge: become a dedicated blood donor and achieve the goal -- donate 32 units of blood! 

Be a donor. We never know when somebody that someone loves will need it. There are other kids that other parents surely love as much. There are other hospitals full of other kids. Sadly, many of these kids have more hospital stays in their future where they will require more blood. As the ARC says, the need is constant, the gratification is instant.

Be a donor.


Please.