As students give blood to the Red Cross at the top of the Hopkins Center Wednesday, they will be greeted by a six-foot drop of blood mascot waddling around. But they won't see people on the receiving end of Dartmouth's once-a-term blood drive, recipients like Lou Longo and Jennifer Kochman. Longo has used donations for almost a year to survive chemotherapy and Kochman requires monthly transfusions to manage her chronic blood disease.
In the fall of 2002, Longo, from Pelham, N.H., considered himself to be a relatively healthy, athletic family man with a nagging flu. When his symptoms persisted for a month and resisted antibiotics, he went to a doctor for blood work, who sent him to a hematologist, who administered a bone marrow biopsy that tested positive for leukemia.
The next night, immediately after his sons' joint birthday party, Longo checked into Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"My situation is a typical you-never-thought-it-would-happen-to-you," he said.
Two days later, on Nov. 10, Longo was fit for a Hickman line, a type of intravenous catheter used to administer chemotherapeutic drugs. This procedure was his last waking memory until Jan. 2, 2003.
When the aggressive chemotherapy hit his weakened lungs, "World War III broke out," Longo said.
The treatment caused him to develop Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, which led to massive internal bleeding.
For two precarious months Longo relied on constant transfusions. He called himself "a great poster boy for the urgent need of blood."
Each day, his wife took their children to school, drove from New Hampshire to Boston through morning rush hour, sat by his bedside, drove home through evening rush hour, and then looked after the children.
"She repeated that vicious cycle everyday," he said. "It was much harder on my family than [on] me."
On what the Longo family calls "black Monday," Longo was attached to a ventilator and read his Last Rites. Yet somehow he survived and recalls opening his eyes in a hospital room to the pleasant scene of his "buddy Tom watching a football game."
Between the chemotherapy and ARDS, Longo's body required over 50 units of blood, much of it in emergency time crunches.
While Longo was unconscious for most of his transfusions, Kochman, who lives in South Burlington, Vt., is keenly aware of how hers feel.
"The first change I notice is that sensation comes back to my cheeks and lips," she said. "It's like a blush [and] I feel more energetic," she wrote on the Red Cross website.
In 1990, Kochman was diagnosed with Refractory Anemia with Ringed Sideroblasts, a rare, incurable disease characterized by debilitating anemia.
Because of a deficiency in Kochman's bone marrow, her blood does not contain enough red blood cells, which carry energizing oxygen. The proportion of blood volume consisting of red blood cells is indicated by a hematocrit count; a normal female's ranges between 34 and 47 percent.
Kochman's count naturally lies around 23, but dipped as low as 17.3 this fall, when she recalls losing sensation in her tongue and fingers, needing to sit in the supermarket, and feeling cold all the time.
There is no cure for RARS. Kochman is too old for a bone marrow transplant and four different trial drugs have failed. Regular blood transfusions, however, raise Kochman's hematocrit count to between 29 and 33, a level that allows her to lead a quasi-normal life.
"There is nothing you can do," the doctor who first diagnosed Kochman told her. "You will have to learn to live at two-thirds speed."
At first, Kochman quit her part-time job and says she spent time learning her limits and "trying to get grounded and not let it throw me." She focused on diet and exercise and has since been able to work about 30 hours a week.
Doctors normally project RARS patients to live about five years, but Kochman has survived with the condition for 17. She is grateful that donated blood grants her a shred of normalcy.
"I really thank these people loud and clear," she said. "If you give blood you can be absolutely sure that you've helped someone."
