By Emma C. Fermo, Red Cross writer

For the last decade, John and Christine Burke have arrived at the American Red Cross donor center in Portland, Maine together. They compare schedules at the kitchen table, pick up Saturday or Sunday, and settle into their chairs side by side for the two-to-three-hour platelet donation.

It is a routine for the Burkes. It is also, in their telling, a competition.

The competition has stakes now. Christine, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, is temporarily ineligible to donate.

“After you’ve been married for 47 years, everything becomes a competition,” Christine Burke says, “He can’t surpass me in number of units, that's not going to happen.”

The Burkes, who live in Scarborough, did not arrive at platelet donation in a single moment. Their decision to donate, a staggering 400 units collective so far, has surfaced through a multitude of family connections that have quietly accumulated over the years. John, a semiretired physician, has been donating blood since high school. His parents, both O negative blood types, inspired John. His father, donated regularly, and the example -- the simple act of showing up – became something John never thought twice about.

Christine, a nurse for 48 years, started donating blood as a student. “All of the nursing students would go over and donate blood at the hospital every once in a while,” she said. She kept giving regularly whenever possible.

Platelets, however, came later for the Burkes.

Christine and John’s youngest son, Dan, who was living in Boston at the time began donating platelets after being asked when donating blood.

Christine’s brother, who she says, “made John and I feel like two cents looking for change,” after he donated one of his kidneys...

Around the same time, a close friend of the Burkes was diagnosed with leukemia. He needed platelets often throughout his treatment, and the abstraction of platelet donation became suddenly and painfully concrete.

The Burkes started donating platelets in 2020; partly for him, partly because their son was, partly because it was simply the next thing for a family already oriented toward giving. Their friend eventually lost his battle with leukemia. By then, the Burkes had built platelet donations into the rhythm of their lives.

The Burkes, equipped with a different background from many other donors, shared that they understood the need for platelets and just how precarious the supply is. John has spent his career on the receiving end of platelet orders. John recalls seeing a patient whose count, diminished by chemotherapy and another’s body consuming platelets faster than they could produce.

Christine recalled John's perspective on the issue from his hospital years. “He has often said, ‘You didn't realize when you would say, OK, get me some platelets for this person, how important that was: that somebody be on the other end donating that unit.’ It truly saves lives.”

That awareness sharpens what it means to walk into the donor center and find an empty chair. “I've come in here, and I've been the only one,” John says. “Thinking to myself, ‘OK, well, I'm the only one in this shift. There's somebody that might be needing something that can't get it because of that.’”

For Christine, the past several months have rewritten her relationship to the donor chair: not because she has stopped believing in it, but because she has been told to wait. The diagnosis came suddenly. Her routine mammogram followed by the request for a needle biopsy revealed the fast-growing cancer.

Christine shares that she does not need chemotherapy, and instead had gone for radiation treatment 15 minutes a day for four weeks.

Just now, Christine feels better, eager to donate again, she says... but rules to donate require a one-year wait after a cancer diagnosis before donating. For Christine, every bit the lawyer she trained to be, has gone over the rules with John.

“I said, ‘I think we should call and check.’ Yeah, that's the lawyer in me. ‘Wait a minute, we need more definition here.’”