Alachua County Sheriff touts blood donation

(Gainesville, Fla.) Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell was a regular blood donor, she just never thought she’d be on the receiving end because she had a back-up plan, her identical twin sister, Norma Darnell. But life had a couple of lessons to offer her.

In late July Darnell, 55, was preparing to attend the Florida Sheriffs’ Conference in St. Augustine. As part of her regular fitness plan she and Norma were climbing the 239 steps down into Florida’s most famous and scenic sinkhole, the Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park, which is just a few blocks from her home. After seven circuits up and down, she noticed her heart was racing, but she wasn’t really worried.

But in the opening session at the conference, she knew for sure there was a problem. When she stood to salute the flag as it was carried into the room, she was so dizzy she needed to grab the table to keep from toppling over. A mid-day nap didn’t help, either. “My arms and legs felt like they weighed a hundred pounds,” she says.

By the next morning she was feeling so weak that she couldn’t walk the 100 yards from the elevator to her room without taking a break. She was also beginning to feel a tightness in her chest, and she began to suspect she might be having a heart attack. She was determined to get home before that happened. So she packed up and began the 70-mile drive back to her doctor in Gainesville.
“I knew something was terribly wrong,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die in Alachua County’.”

Her doctor checked her over, took a blood sample and sent her home. An hour later he called her back. “You’ve got a major bleed somewhere,” was his message, telling her that her blood level was down nearly two-thirds from normal. His order was to get someone else to drive her to the hospital. She drafted Norma as her official someone else. “As a twin I always thought I had an ace in the hole, I’ve got an extra kidney, I’ve got blood,” she explains.

So, when she got to the hospital she had a message, “Great, here’s my sister, plug me in!”
But it wasn’t that simple. The doctors began running a series of test, checking everything from the most dire, a deadly disease, to the most simple cause. It turned out the answer was in her medicine chest. The over-the-counter supplements she was taking to boost her antioxidant intake and lower her cholesterol were having a negative reaction with a prescription she was taking for blood pressure.
 The diagnosis was that she was suffering from hemolytic anemia, a condition she describes in law enforcement terms. “My red blood cells were destroying themselves, and my white blood cells were going out there like a SWAT team,” she says.

It also took her ace in the hole off the table. Norma’s blood was too close of a match, it would suffer the same problems as her own. So three units of blood, donated by three anonymous strangers, put Darnell on the road to recovery.

Darnell says she always associated needing blood with car accidents or major surgeries, so needing some herself was a surprise, and needing it from a stranger was an even bigger shock.
“I never would have thought, never, never would have predicted,” she says. “I started feeling great immediately.”

She also felt a little foolish, because she thinks her problem could have been prevented. It’s one of those lessons that she’s learned that she’s now trying to pass on to anyone who is willing to listen.
“Tell your doctor everything you are taking, even vitamins and other supplements,” she says. “As conscientious, and as very practical as I am, and as I’ve been, I’ve been humbled because I did not do a very simple thing that could have killed me.” Her close call was also an eye-opener. She’s amended her favorite slogan from “Life is good,” to “Life is good every day.”

 “There’s nothing like nearly dying to make you appreciate being alive every day,” she says.
And when it comes to donating, she has a better understanding of the importance of donating blood, calling herself a “blood donor evangelist.”

J.D. Pettyjohn is the district director for LifeSouth Community Blood Centers’ North Florida District. He says when people are touched personally by the need for blood, it affects them.
“They’ll either start donating themselves or spread the word to increase the awareness for the need for blood donations,” Pettyjohn says. And raising that awareness is critical. “Most people think they’ll never need blood in their life, or they just assume that it will be readily available when they do,” Pettyjohn says. “The truth is if we don’t have donors, we can’t meet the needs of our communities,” Pettyjohn says.

 LifeSouth operates in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, collecting more than 700 units of blood daily to meet the needs of more than 120 medical facilities. The North Florida District operates two centers in Gainesville, one each in Chiefland, Lake City and Palatka, and has six bloodmobiles on the road seven days a week.

Darnell says she offers her thanks to those anonymous donors who helped save her life. She also appreciates the effort of LifeSouth. “What LifeSouth does, being so very involved in the community and so out there, I think it’s life saving. It could very well be called LifeSaving instead of LifeSouth,” Darnell says.