Barbara gives 100 Gallons.
 

Barbara Gives 100 Gallons - Donate Blood

I am only at about 7 gallons now. That's lifetime. Not just at One Blood here in the Villages.

Bless her heart. Platelets is the only way to reach a number like that. It's great, but we need to remember that we also need whole blood too and you can only give 5 pints a year. When I give platelets, I give a triple, or 3 pints per visit. I can donate 22 times a year, so that's 66 pints a year. I'm not saying anything bad about platelets, but we still need whole blood, plasma, and red blood cells. When you go to One Blood to donate, they'll tell you what you qualify for. More people need to donate.

I have not been counting the extra pints when giving platelets. I have done some doubles if I am remembering these correctly. I am at 8 1/8 gallons according to my OneBlood profile. That does not count the times since I registered at Florida Blood Centers (OneBlood's former name) back around 2007 when I donated at LifeSouth and/or the Tampa Bay blood bank. I must be close to 9 Gallons then.

All I know is that I have gave a lot. Never tried to keep track but I have been giving since I was 21 and I am now 67. I had a brother with no kidneys from a birth defect and he got a pint of blood once a month. I just try to pay it back.

I only started donating to impress a hot blonde woman named Sandy at Information Access Company in 1983. Had one donation while a Law Student at the University of Minnesota but that was mainly to appease my Middlebrook Hall Residence Graduate Floor Director who was rounding up students to go donate around the Spring of 1989. I really only started donating to get movie tickets and other gifts around Oldsmar, Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs around 1997. I continued this when we moved to the Villages but not until 2007. My main reason though has been the various gifts AND the feeling of having done something selfless for other people. I still hate needles though and almost always look away when they go in. After the 10/08/2015 fiasco-- which was partly my fault for being a milquetoast when the needle went all the way through the vein-- I will probably be a lot more wary of trying to impress hot blondes with my toughness of facing the needles. We will see how I do on 12/14/2015, my next appointment to donate whole blood. I will start doing platelets again at the end of the year and probably continue. Maybe, I will do these with one arm though as I never liked the feeling of having little control over anything with the two arm platelet donations. I never did get to finish watching George Clooney's The Descendants. They do have a lot of good movies at the Villages Donation Center.