It’s critical that hospitals have lifesaving blood products on hand for trauma victims and all who depend on transfusions. In some of the most dire situations, medical teams may need to use hundreds of blood products to save a life.

Paulette Cancler, a mother of four and grandmother of 13, credited 37 blood transfusions she received with saving her life from a heart-related complication during a 4 ½-week span at multiple hospitals earlier this year.

“There’s no way I would have survived,” she said. “The only way I survived was literally from the blood transfusions.”

Cancler has been living with heart disease since a widowmaker heart attack nearly took her life in 2015. In the last 10 years, she has received two stents to improve blood flow to her heart, a defibrillator to keep her heart pumping in a normal rhythm and a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to assist her heart in pumping blood. She hopes a heart transplant is in her future.

Her most recent hospital stays were to stop a persistent bleed in her gastrointestinal tract, a common complication associated with a LVAD.

“I’m starting to feel really good,” she said. “My doctors said that the amount of blood I received was almost equivalent to four people.”

Cancler is grateful to the volunteer blood donors whose generosity made it possible for her to be discharged from the last hospital stay on March 26. That day, she was able to meet her 13th grandchild who was born just hours earlier.

“I didn’t recognize how important it is,” Cancler said of blood donations, adding she wants to be an advocate for giving blood. “Do it for the kindness of your heart, knowing that the blood you just gave is going to help save someone’s life.”

With summer approaching, the American Red Cross urges donors to set a goal to help save lives by booking blood and platelet donation appointments now and the coming months. Donors of all blood types – especially type O and platelets – are needed for people counting on blood products for critical medical treatments.

In the past few months Cancler has been reflecting on her life and family, thankful for the love and support of her husband (“he’s my everything”), children and grandchildren. She expressed cautious optimism that she can muster the energy to be a doting grandmother.

“I think about what I’ve been through and what I have to live for – my husband, our kids and our grandkids.  Especially our grandkids.

“The younger two girls are three and six. We have them just about every weekend, and you need energy for a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old.”

By David Olejarz, regional communications director