Friends of Jasper Mohan and his family are hoping to gauge interest on organizing a community blood donation clinic to pay tribute to the teenager.
In one of Jasper’s final blog posts before he died last week, the 15-year-old with brain and spinal cancer wrote about how important his more than 50 blood transfusions were.
“This isn’t unusual in my situation,” wrote Jasper. “In fact, some leukemia patients need many, many more. The key here is that it’s vital. If you have a blood disorder, or if chemo is affecting your blood cell production, you don’t create enough blood cells. Thankfully, that’s where you guys can help. The blood cells these kids so desperately need are easy for you guys to produce, and you have more than enough to spare.”
Patricia Wilkinson and Gaye Ross are friends of the Mohan family and have set out to organize community blood donations.
“We had actually started planning this before he posted,” said Wilkinson. “We wanted to move this along farther.”
One challenge to make this happen is that the Canadian Blood Service (CBS), which is the body collecting blood donations, does not run a blood collection clinic in Powell River. The closest one is a mobile unit in Courtenay at the Florence Filberg Centre (411 Anderton Avenue).
In a telephone interview with the Peak, a spokesperson for CBS explained that a mobile blood clinic is not offered in Powell River for many reasons, but principally cost. In BC the central office for CBS is located in Vancouver and it operates its mobile clinics out of that location. CBS operates a clinic in downtown Courtenay three days each month.
“We can’t hold clinics in every community, so sometimes we have to come up with solutions to help those communities that want to support us do that,” said Marcelo Dominguez, CBS spokesperson. “That’s kind of the situation we have in Powell River.”
Dominguez said there’s a complex system for blood distribution in Canada and local hospitals are not dependent on local blood donating clinics.
Wilkinson is hoping to have a group from Powell River travel over to one of the clinics held in September. If she can gather enough people together to go, she will be able to work with CBS to personalize the clinic a bit and make it more of a cohesive event.
“We’ve been invited to clog up a clinic by bringing over a bunch of people from Powell River,” she said.
She also wanted to publicize the dates of the clinic in the summer, so that if Powell River residents are taking a trip to Vancouver Island they may be able to coordinate their trip to give blood as well. The clinic is open from July 23 to 25, August 13 to 15 and September 17 to 19.
“Donating blood is probably not a priority for you,” wrote Jasper, “but it should be.”
For more information about the times of the clinics, readers can visit the CBS website. For more information about travelling as a group to the clinic, readers can contact Wilkinson by email at [email protected] or phone at 604.483.9511.
