CLEVELAND — When you see 16-year-old Dylan Fink playing basketball for Stow High School, it’s hard to believe that he was in a hospital bed just a year prior.
“If your numbers are really low, you’re really weak and you can’t do anything. Even just walking to the bathroom is exhausting,” said Fink, looking back on that time.“As a parent, that’s scary, just to hear that your kid needs blood,” said Ed Fink. “He desperately needed it and we didn’t realize how important blood products were for people battling cancer.”
“Our teams have been working to say with our short blood supply, how can we best conserve it? Are there ways we can use just the right amount that we need and none more on a particular patient? Or are there certain patients that should receive a blood supply and we can do a different therapeutic option for someone else? We're in that point, right now, where we're really making those decisions,” she said.
University Hospitals is one of 70 hospitals in Northeast Ohio that rely on donations from the Red Cross. “I think that a lot of people forget that the only way we can get blood is from volunteer donors. We can't stockpile it. It has a shelf life, a red blood cells only last 42 days. They have to be replenished, and platelets, which are a component of blood, only last five days,” she said.
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