He drains his veins about as often as many of us fill our cars’ gas tanks, and he’s been doing it longer than most of us have been driving.
“Every other Thursday, I come to the blood bank,” Carroll Sharp of Jacksonville began, “I started donating in the 1960s. It was probably ’65 or ’66.”
Something he started while living and working in Kentucky. Carroll, a Louisville native, moved to the First Coast in 1976, to work for what is now CSX. Until that time his blood donations had primarily been traditional “whole” donations – the kind most people do in about a half-hour, one pint at a time. But he eventually shifted his focus to donating platelets, a procedure that can be done more often, yet requires a two-hour visit each time.
“The needles don’t bother me,” he told First Coast News on Thursday, not long after being feted for reaching a lifetime donation milestone of 120 gallons. He’s lost count of individual donations.
“I’ve never tried to figure it out. You could do the math. There’s eight pints to a gallon.”
That would multiply to roughly 960 times sitting in a chair and being pierced by those needles he doesn’t fear, though he estimates the real number to exceed a thousand.
Given the varying time requirements of the procedures, a sum total of his life that he’s spent being drained is hard to peg.
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