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By JOHN BARRY, Deputy Floridian EditorEvery day, Florida Blood Services is desperate for more blood. Luckily, people like Wally Edington don't mind rolling up their sleeves.
On the June afternoon that Wally Edington topped off Gallon No. 70, Florida Blood Services had one bag of O-negative red blood cells in its delivery bins, and no B-positive. These are the margins Tampa Bay area hospitals have grown used to in the past two years. At the end of May, it ran out of all Type O.
Blood emergencies happen in the most ordinary way. Someone just checks the bins at the end of the day and finds them empty.
Stacks of frozen red-blood-cell bags look like icy fruit drinks on their way to the accident and gunshot victims at Bayfront and Tampa General. Other stacks have the color of yellow murk. The platelets in them look like misshapen fish, swimming in buttermilk. A pathologist calls them “little swimming dolphin,” with wonder in his voice.
They breathe. Oxygen permeates their special plastic bags. The platelets kiss the plastic to get air. Most of them go to adult cancer patients at Moffitt and baby cancer patients at All Children’s.
In all, 38 hospitals in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco and Manatee counties draw from the bins. Most days, hospitals order between 400 and 500 units of O-positive, used in half of all transfusions. By day’s end, the bins often look as sparse as the flashlight aisle at Home Depot after a hurricane warning.
There’s never enough blood because medicine has too many uses for it, because there are too many cars, too many guns. There are too many tattoos and pierced noses, too many tourists and military returning from foreign places where there is malaria or mad cow disease. There are too many worries about HIV and hepatitis B.
Wally Edington’s 560th pint was collected by technician Christy McGarry, who says, “I’ve probably stuck him 15 or 16 times.”
He’s one of the family at Florida Blood Services. They all know that he is the son of deaf parents, he’s proficient at sign language, he is a graduate of American University. They all know that when he isn’t there he’s at the nearby Bon Secours nursing home, where his wife stays. “Sue is 78,” Wally says, “a young 78.”
Most of their lives, they lived in Maryland. He designed business systems for the federal government. Wally and Sue raised a son and a daughter, who gave them five grandchildren, who gave them 12 great-grandchildren.
Their life in Pinellas Park turned upside down six years ago when Sue suffered two strokes. She has been at Bon Secours ever since. Wally goes there every afternoon and stays through the evening.
He himself is “so damn healthy it’s pitiful.” He had prostate cancer three months ago, but feels good. “It’s because I change my blood every two weeks,” he says.
The chronic blood shortage, he says, is because “people don’t like being stuck with needles.”
There are actually about 50 ways not to be a donor. That is the number of questions every donor is asked before giving. Wally has never flunked the questionnaire, but that’s because he’s never had a navel ring or been to Nigeria. About one person in five does flunk.
A donor goes into a room. Someone in hospital scrubs comes in and goes down the list. Some questions are predictable: Are you pregnant? Are you taking an antibiotic, or an aspirin or other blood thinner? Have you lived with someone who has hepatitis? Are you feeling okay?
Then come the less predictable ones:
Since 1980, have you spent five years or more in Europe? Have you received a blood transfusion in the United Kingdom?
Have you been to Africa or Latin America?
Have you had a tattoo in the last year? What about a body piercing?
Have you had sexual contact with anyone who has HIV/AIDS?
Have you had sexual contact with a prostitute?
Have you had sexual contact with a male who has had sexual contact with another male?
Mad cow has helped to nearly put MacDill Air Force Base out of business as a blood source. Up until 1984, MacDill personnel donated about 7,000 units of blood a year. Now they donate about 1,000.
Some of that loss is because of downsizing at MacDill and a one-year wait for veterans back from Iraq, but mad cow has had devastating consequences. It has meant that all military and their dependents who have been stationed in Europe or the United Kingdom for five years or more are forever excluded from giving blood.
“Even though there have been only two or three mad cow transfusions in all those years in the United Kingdom, those are the regulations,” says Dr. German Leparc, chief medical officer at Florida Blood Services.
Some other losses go unaccounted for.
“The FDA has very strict rules on donor eligibility, including restrictions against any man who has had sex with another man since 1977,” Leparc said. “There’s no scientific backing for that anymore; it’s a rule set in the ’80s we’ve been stuck with. But how many people, including the families of gay men, won’t donate blood because they think we’re a bunch of bigots? It’s an unseen consequence.”
On top of those losses are the losses of those who must wait a year if they’ve gotten a tattoo, or pierced their ears at home, or who take aspirin as a prevention against heart attacks, or those whose blood registers a false positive when tested for HIV or hepatitis B. (Even false-positive blood must be discarded.) “It all adds up,” Leparc said.
Even J.B. Gaskins, vice president of donor systems at Florida Blood Services, is on the blacklist. He served in Iraq last year with his Army reserve unit.
In all these years, Wally Edington has never known any of those thousands of accident victims or cancer patients who survived because they got his blood.
Except for one.
He was living in Maryland then. He got a call from George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C. They had a man who was in bad shape. He needed A-positive blood. Could Wally rush right over?
“I was going to my cousin’s wedding in Bethesda, but I went to the hospital,” Wally says. “The man worked for Associated Press. He had tried to commit suicide.
“He lived. He probably hates me.”
John Barry can be reached at (727) 892-2258 or jbarry@sptimes.com.