This year, 51 pints (or 6.375 gallons) of blood were collected at Tahoma High School over a 2-day period.

Clare Nance, the teacher who runs the blood drive at the school, denotes how 77 signed up over the two day time span to have their blood donated. (However, 26 were turned down for various reasons, such as having a fever, or having too little or too much iron in their blood).

Nance further talked about how the goal was to have 51 students signed up per day, or 102 students in total. In addition, she stated that this year had much less yields than previous years (such as last year which had almost all available slots filled).

While there were less blood donors than previous years, Nance still defines this year as a success, because “even the kids who don’t donate are still hearing about it. Most blood donors who donate are older – like older than me and as that population ages out we need younger people to come in and do it, but a lot of people who donate blood started donating when we had a war … and our culture is a little different now, I think people are a lot more self-centered … but anyways the data is clear that the majority of blood donors are older.”

Though generally Nance defines success as filling up all available slots, she also hopes “that kids think this [pain/experience] isn’t so bad, I’m going to tell my friends about it.”

Blood donors Kyra Dodge and Justinn Hoobler report a similar opinion on the blood drive being not painful, with Dodge rating rating it a two out of five on a pain scale and Hoobler stating “in the beginning when they are stabbing you with the thing, I would say like a three, tolerable, but when you were in it, I barely felt anything.”

After being asked how much of a disruption getting blood taken was to his learning, Hoobler said “not that much.”

Upon being asked the same question, Dodge said, “not at all, I mean I missed a class period, but I was able to figure out what I missed.”

Dodge’s motivation to donate blood was “I wanted to skip class, … it saves three lives.”

Hoobler’s motivation to donate blood was similar, “wanna save lives, feels nice, feels like a good thing to do, would recommend.”

For more information, check out Bloodworks Northwest (https://bloodworksnw.org/).