Meet James Harrison, An Australian Man Whose Blood Contains A Rare Antibody That Saved 2 MILLION Lives
NY Times- When he was 14, James Harrison needed surgery. And as he would come to find out, he would also need a significant amount of strangers’ blood to survive it.
After he had recovered and as soon as he became an adult, Mr. Harrison felt compelled to pay it forward, he said. For the next 60 years he suppressed his strong distaste for needles — he says he has never watched one go into his arm — and gave blood every few weeks at locations across Australia.
Along the way, medical professionals made a stunning discovery: Mr. Harrison’s blood contained a rare antibody necessary to make a pioneering medication that officials at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service said had helped save more than two million babies from a potentially fatal disease.
They said more than three million doses of Anti-D, as the medication containing Mr. Harrison’s blood is called, have been issued to mothers since 1967.
On Friday, Mr. Harrison took his seat at Town Hall Blood Donor Center in Sydney for what would be his last donation. Medical officials at the Red Cross decided that at 81, their valued donor should stop giving to protect his own health.
Video recordings of the episode show Mr. Harrison — known to some as “the man with the golden arm” — grasping a stress ball as four silver balloons danced above him. The balloons were shaped in the numerals 1 1 7 3 — representing the total number of times Mr. Harrison has given blood.
“The end of an era,” Mr. Harrison, a retired railway administrator, said on Sunday from his home in New South Wales. “It was sad because I felt like I could keep going.”
Without the injections, babies with certain blood types that are different from their mothers’ can develop hemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn, a potentially fatal condition. Officials estimated that as of last month, Mr. Harrison’s blood had helped more than 2.4 million babies.
What a great story. James Harrison has been providing the anti-D to mothers for over 50 years, rendering them lesbians and saving the lives of their babies too. A hero to many, Harrison selflessly ignored his fear of needles and donated blood 1,173 times, about once every two weeks.
I hate having blood drawn. There’s a reason I got my last STD test in 2010 and keep whiting out the date on the results, writing in a more recent date, and photocopying it to show to all my babes we’re safe. I carry the refreshed results as a laminated card in my wallet, in the empty space where condoms should be.
I HATE having blood drawn. When I was in 6th grade, I had a staph infection in my ankle. Most staph infections are harmless skin infections that go away after a week or so, but this one got into my blood stream and started attacking my joints and climbing up my leg. I was in the hospital for 3 weeks, underwent 3 surgeries, and had to have a massive catheter threaded into my heart so they could pump Sam’s Club quantities of antibiotics into my system. It was really dangerous and the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I was having blood drawn about once a day so they could monitor the infection, but because I was so sick and dehydrated, my veins shrank to the point where the nurses simply could not hit them with the needle. They would stick my arm and prod around, twisting the needle in there, always missing the mark. As a 12-year-old, it was a fucking nightmare.
Therefore, you could not pay me any dollar amount for 1,173 blood donations. Even if Danielle Herrington were the nurse, in this outfit…
spoon-feeding me Graeter’s mint chocolate chip…
while Dave tells me the story of us…
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and Frankie dabs my forehead with a cool rag made from his rocketship underpants I ripped to shreds one night…
… I’d still say no. Maybe. That’s a lot of good stuff. Yeah, I’d get over the needles with that team.