CityView Magazine

36 | November/December 2017 wounded began pouring into Las Vegas hospitals. And fortunately those drained stores are being replenished. But it's a constant cycle even without a massive tragedy; whole blood donations have a shelf life of only six weeks. is is one reason why local hospitals are seemingly always in a blood shortage, said Lindsey Graham, marketing coordinator for Cape Fear Valley Health System. e blood donor center serves six hospitals, including four owned by the health system – Cape Fear Valley Medical Center and Highsmith-Rainey Specialty Hospital in Fayetteville, Hoke Hospital near Raeford and Bladen County Hospital in Elizabethtown – and two owned by Harnett Health – Betsy Johnson Hospital in Dunn and Central Harnett Hospital in Lillington. ese hospitals use nearly 1,100 units of blood each month. To keep pace, the blood donor center needs about 37 donors a day, either at its office on the Village Drive side of Bordeaux Shopping Center or at one of its near-daily mobile blood drives. If donation numbers drop below that, the center may have to try to buy blood from other sources and doctors may have to reschedule or even cancel surgeries. Blood supplies are particularly stressed around the holidays when many would-be donors are busy with other activities and high school students are on break. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the center's donated blood comes from local high school students who give during mobile blood drives at their schools. Student donors to Cape Fear Valley Blood Donor Center have a low deferral rate, because naturally they are healthiest of the contributing population. Regular donors, like Cape Fear Valley nurse Elizabeth Crawford, provide an estimated 20 percent of the center's blood supply. Crawford, who comes in to give every eight weeks, said it's an easy – and valuable – way to give back. Sixty-nine-year-old Ian Lake, who retired from the Army and from working for the city of Fayetteville, comes in to the center even more frequently – every two weeks – to give platelets, also essential. He figures he has given 45 gallons of platelets since he switched in 1988 to donating them instead of whole blood, which requires a longer wait between donations. I thought of my donation as just a bag of blood. But I was quickly informed it's so much more. That bag of blood is a champion to someone being treated just across the street in Cape Fear Valley's emergency department. It's a hero to someone awaiting their next chemotherapy treatment. It could be the difference between life and death for someone.

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