On about 24 Saturday mornings every year, 67-year-old Chuck Colby of Bellevue wakes up at 3 a.m. He doesn’t use an alarm clock — he never needs one — when he wanders downstairs to chug exactly 32 ounces of water to prepare for his 8 a.m. apheresis appointment, or blood platelet donation.
Colby, who works in Seattle as a senior underwriter at Great American Insurance Group, has spent 12 years volunteering his time for Bloodworks Northwest and more than three decades donating his blood. In more than 30 years of regular donations, Colby has given 1,600 units, or pints, to Bloodworks Northwest.
That’s around 200 gallons of blood from about 700 individual donations. Given that giving platelets takes about two hours, Colby has spent the equivalent of 58 days of his life giving blood.
Colby’s prolific donation record makes him a “hero” among blood donors in Seattle and beyond.
For Bloodworks, an independent nonprofit that supplies blood to more than 90 hospitals in the Pacific Northwest, maintaining an adequate blood supply is an everyday struggle.
During the pandemic, Bloodworks felt the squeeze; blood drives at schools and office buildings stopped, and quarantines and social distancing drove down the number of drop-in blood donations. In the last two years, Bloodworks issued multiple beseeching requests for blood. During an omicron coronavirus wave in January, with donations down 10% since the beginning of the pandemic, the American Red Cross declared its “first-ever blood crisis.”
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