Donate blood at SCU on Tuesday Nov. 4

Peter Ross standing in front of poster at blood drive. Photo provided by Peter Ross

Blood donations for the Stanford Blood Bank can be made at the Santa Clara University Blood Drive between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at the Law School Blood Mobile. All blood types are needed! Appointments may be made at https://sbcdonor.org/donor/schedules/drive_schedule/15382 or donors can just drop in to donate. 

I encourage everyone to donate, especially during the holiday season when there’s a shortage of all blood types. You will feel good in doing so, and you’ll be helping people for whom your blood may mean saving their lives. Also, my Kaiser doctor told me when I was in my 70s that giving blood by healthy people is good for them as it stimulates their bodies.

About fifty years ago, when I gave blood as a grad student at UC Berkeley and before privacy laws got instituted, sometimes recipients were told information about the donors. A social worker friend asked me to give blood for a high school student in Oakland who was a hemophiliac. After I had done so he would usually thank me by letter or postcard (maybe encouraged to do so by his parents!), although I never met him in person. He went east to college, and in his sophomore year his parents wrote to me that sadly he had passed away. But I still hope that our blood donations helped extend his all-too-short life. 

I’ve been giving blood regularly since I was a freshman in college, partly as I spent too many years in grad school when I couldn’t afford to give to charity. I’ve never had a bad experience, although I once briefly fainted hours later after doing all the wrong things, exercising and then having a beer with no food!

Dr. Peter Ross, Senior Lecturer (retired) 

Department of Mathematics & Computer Science