LEWISTON – It’s not until the needle is pulled from her arm that Stacey Dunn becomes faint. In response, a nurse rushes to place dampened paper towels across her neck and brow, and elevates her feet.
The 18-year-old from Greene had donated blood before. Dunn didn’t feel so hot that time, either, but she showed up Wednesday for a blood drive at Lewiston-Auburn College.
“I don’t like needles, but I’m not afraid of them,” she had said, lying on a gurney while the blood was pumped from her arm.
The fact that Dunn was willing to battle her nausea to give blood was good news for the American Red Cross, because she’s exactly the type of donor the organization wants to attract – a young one.
“We have a lot of donors that are of the World War II generation, and they’re dying off and they need to be replaced by younger people,” said charge nurse Christine Sharp-Lopez, who was overseeing the drive.
High schools and college campuses have become popular sites for blood drives in recent years. “It’s felt if you get them donating in that age group, they’re donating for life,” Sharp-Lopez said.
According to the New England regional offices of the American Red Cross Blood Services, the average donor today is between 35 and 54. Even the World War II generation is donating less, often unable to give because of medications people take, spokeswoman Carol Dembeck said.
It’s not that donors have stopped giving, but that demand for blood has risen steadily. The states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont alone require 2,000 pints of blood a day.
At the same time, Dembeck said, fewer people can donate due to relatively new epidemics like mad cow disease, for example. Because there is no test for the illness, many people who lived or traveled in Europe in recent years cannot donate.
However, Dembeck said, “Considering less than 5 percent of people that are eligible actually donate, there’s certainly potential.”
Dunn is part of that potential. So too is Rebecca Moore, 25, of Lewiston. She dropped by the college, where she is a nursing student, to donate Wednesday. “Just to do my part,” she said, “because I know how important it is.”
Moore said that as a working woman, student and mother, she has little time for other community service commitments. But donating blood takes only about an hour, so she intends to keep doing it whenever time allows.
Catherine McKinney, 20, of Auburn, felt similarly. She donated for the first time last year while still in high school.
“I’m too busy to really help out in the community, so I figure this will help me do my part,” she said as she waited for her turn.
As it happened, no young men signed up to donate blood Wednesday. Students from the occupational therapy program, which hosted the drive, had attempted to recruit donors beforehand.
“Every guy that walked by and we asked said that they were afraid of needles,” said student Trisha Turgeon, 26.
Turgeon was scheduled to donate in the afternoon.
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