Giving the Gift of Life

A donor's plasma has saved countless babies. He's donated 500 times and doesn't plan on stopping.

- BY Helen Signy

EVERY OTHER WEEK, Arthur Croft pulls out of his farm near Albury in New South Wales, Australia, and drives 130 kilometres north to Wagga Wagga. He enjoys the 90-minute journey, along country roads and paddocks, through rain and sunshine.

When he arrives at his destination, the Wagga Wagga Base Hospital, he's welcomed like an old friend. He fills out a questionnaire and has his blood pressure taken. Nurses prick his finger and squeeze out a drop of blood to Children like Leo Manwaring might not be alive today if not for the blood donations of men like Arthur Croft.

measure his blood glucose levels. It doesn’t hurt; he’s done it so often he hardly notices.

Croft climbs onto a comfortable recliner chair and a nurse wraps a tourniquet around his arm and inserts a needle. Soon, dark blood rushes into a plastic tube connected to a plasma donation machine. Inside, a centrifuge spins the blood, separating the liquid plasma from the red blood cells and platelets. The gold-coloured plasma collects in a little bag attached to the machine and will be added to a plasma bank that will save the lives of up to 50,000 Australian babies each year.

A brief biology lesson to understand just how special these gifts are: We all have one of four blood types (A, B, AB or O), which we inherit from our parents. Our blood is also Rhesus positive or negative, which refers to whether we have a protein called D antigen on the surface of our red blood cells.