21/08/2026
“Earlier this year, my husband Grant lost his arm. He spent 40 days in the hospital, fighting for his life. We had many ups and downs in those 40 days, but he made it. And in large part to the donated blood he received. At one point when we were making our way out of the ICU, a doctor mentioned that most of Grant’s blood was actually not his.
For a moment, I couldn't quite process what he meant. How could his blood not be his? I had watched the transfusions for days, but never put it all together. The blood pumping through him now belonged to dozens of people who saved him and they will never know what they did for us. That’s how the system works. We depend on enough people deciding to do something most of us never think about until someone we love needs it.
What struck me wasn't simply that strangers had helped save him, it was how invisible those strangers were. We celebrate surgeons, doctors, and nurses (and rightly so!) but none of them can do their jobs if the blood isn't there.
In Canada, roughly 400,000 people donate blood each year to support a country of 41 million. Less than one per cent of Canadians are carrying a responsibility that every one of us assumes will be there. We depend entirely on Canadians choosing to show up. We (as a general population) support blood donation in principle, but getting people to donate is harder than it sounds.
I walked into a Canadian Blood Services donor centre last month to give my first blood donation. What I didn’t expect was the wave of emotion that came over me when the volunteer asked me a simple question: “What brings you in to donate today?”
I know that donating blood won’t erase everything we’ve been through and it won’t give Grant his arm back, but it has given me a way to connect to how we got here. So when the volunteer asked what brought me in to donate that day, I realized there wasn't a simple answer. It was part gratitude, part healing, and part wanting to do for someone else what strangers had done for us. It was my turn.” – Christine Burke, blood donor
