Last week, the Arkansas Blood Institute hosted a campus blood drive on the week of Jan. 31, where students were encouraged to donate blood and received a shirt and a voucher for a free pass into the cowboy and western heritage museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The Mobile Supervisor, Willy Arndt, and the rest of his team, will return to the Tech campus eight weeks from now. He encourages students and faculty alike to donate if they can. “It’s been really rough with the Covid situation… We like to have people come out. We really need you if you can,” he stated.
There are two different ways to donate blood with the mobile drive. Whole blood donation, which the entirety of the blood is taken and stored; and Double red cell donation, in which a machine separates the patient’s red blood cells from the other blood components, and the platelets and plasma are returned along with saline. This allows a patient to donate two units worth of red blood cells.
One must wait eight weeks to be able to donate blood again after giving. The waiting period extends to 16 weeks for the double red cell donation.
For more information, visit the Arkansas Blood Institute’s website at arkbi.com to find the nearest donation center, or visit Tech’s Health and Wellness website at atuhwc.com
