Amanda: the Donor Carer and the Evil Blood Keeper
Amanda Price reflects on her pandemic lockdown memories as a donor carer for the Teesside team, and shares a heart-warming story from her nephew about the importance of donor carers.
I was a regular donor before I became a donor carer and every time I went to donate, it was such a pleasant feeling. The staff were always amazing, and it really inspired me to do what they were doing.
I’m now a donor carer for the Teesside team, and have been for the last nine years. What I enjoy the most about being a donor carer is hearing donor stories every day. Finding out what inspired them to donate, donors reaching their milestones and just being a part of each donor’s journey. Seeing the commitment from many donors is comforting, knowing that, together, we’re working to save and improve lives.
Reflecting back to the spring lockdown, I remember at the beginning, there was a lot of panic. We were all watching the news, not knowing what exactly was going to happen.
I’m glad to say we got our act together extremely fast: we changed our guidelines and we stuck to them. We were able to adhere to social distancing, whilst still trying to run our sessions as smoothly as possible. The biggest challenge we faced as a team during the pandemic was the venues.
We hold our sessions in small venues, like church halls, and there is normally one room we use for the beds and the screening. We need to use the small side rooms for waiting donors but because of the social distancing rules, these were often no longer suitable. We had to find much larger venues that could provide extra space for triage, which took place before donors were even allowed in to the main room. Luckily, we’ve had a couple of venues within north east that have opened their doors for us and allowed us to use their space for donations.
Even though we’ve had to ask donors to travel further than they usually would for their donations, a lot of our donors have still made that journey and we’ve not seen a lack of numbers yet.
During the lockdown, my 8-year-old nephew Lucas was asked to do his homework about a key worker, and he picked me.
Lucas' comic book about the Evil Blood Keeper
Amanda spends her time taking blood from others to help people. One day, when she was at work, the evil blood keeper burst through the door!
Amanda knew she had to defeat him, or he might tell people not to give blood! She wrapped him up in bandages and put him in a cage. The blood keeper went to villain prison and everyone was happy.
Amanda was so happy to finally get rid of him and keep saving lives.
I think his story is just amazing, it highlights how children can be aware of blood donation, especially when they have family members that donate blood and I think children can relate to it and learn the importance of giving blood. My brother, Lucas’ dad, is also regular donor and that would’ve inspired him to come up with such a creative story about blood donation.
