Their Gifts Keep Me Alive
A pediatrician examined the five-day-old baby, diagnosed hemophilia and quickly referred the parents to Puget Sound Blood Center. For Reid, now 33, it was the beginning of a life-long affiliation with the Blood Center.

From infancy through adulthood, he has lived with the treatments, the physical limitations, the slow-clotting cuts and the more dangerous bruising and internal bleeding that all sever hemophiliacs endure.

He’s also lived with pain. A slightly sprained ankle can bleed unchecked inside the joint capsule; it not only hurts, but it can lead to deformity and arthritis.

The Blood Center has helped Reid deal with it all. For over three decades, he and other Northwest patients have received both medical care and education about coping with bleeding disorders through the Blood Center’s hemophilia clinic and its annual camp retreat.

“Camp I-V is invaluable,” he says. “It allows patient families to get together: parents talk to one another; kids talk to other hemophiliacs and find out that, despite all the blood products we receive, we’re really not that different.

“Without the Blood Center’s hemophilia program, I don’t know how my life would have turned out,” Reid says. Not as well, he reasons, without the care he received from hemophilia clinic co-founders Dr. Richard Counts, who is now the Blood Center president and CEO, and Dr. Art Thompson, who still runs the program.

“Also, for me to have a ‘normal life,’ I need the protein from 45 pints of blood every week,” Reid explains. “That’s a lot of people donating to Puget Sound Blood Center and I’m really very appreciative. I really do have a normal life because of them.”