Even when you know how important giving blood is, it takes on a new meaning when someone you love needs it.
That was the case for a local mom whose immediate instinct was to help refill the lifesaving blood bank that saved her son as he faced leukemia.
When a mother nurtures two premature babies through infancy, she hopes the most difficult times would be behind her. But for Naomi Trotto, that wasn’t going to be the case as her son Tyler was diagnosed with leukemia. But like she felt when he was a baby, she needed to help where she could.
Tyler Trotto, 14, had been feeling sick for a few days when he went to the hospital.
“They did a full blood panel and discovered leukemia,” Naomi Trotto said. “He has acute lymphoblastic leukemia B-cell.”
“One of my first questions I had was, ‘Was I gonna die?’ and the first response from everybody was no,” Tyler said. “So, it made me feel so much better, and I was relieved through the whole treatment.”
But even with that reassurance, he was in for a difficult course of treatment.
“The feeling of the chemo and all that was just terrible, and like I had to learn how to swallow pills,” Tyler said. “All of that was just -- it was just a sucky time, to be honest.”
“Thankfully, he’s responded well to treatment and has not needed any kind of bone marrow transplant or things like that,” Trotto said. “He has, however, gotten nine bags of blood and three bags of platelets.
“He would get really, really pale, different from if you’re sick pale, regular sick. For him, when he got pale, it would be gray. He would look very gray, like, and he would be lethargic.”
But blood transfusions had an immediate effect.
“You go from feeling terrible to feeling, to be honest, like 90% better,” Tyler said.
His mother saw how the transfusions helped her son, and she was moved to do more.
“I had two preemies,” Trotto said. “I thought that was enough. When your kids are born early, there’s so much you surrender to the hospital and to the nurses that you don’t have control over.”
But the maternal instinct is powerful.
“When your child is fighting for their life, you want to help, and so I was able to breastfeed both of my children out of the NICU, and I was able to be a part of their treatment and kind of partner with the doctors,” Trotto said.
“When it came time for this, I don’t have the same blood type as him. Even if I did, I probably couldn’t directly donate to him. So, the first bag got hung, and my initial thought is, ‘How can I help?’”
They’ve held four blood drives o far, and they’ve been successful.
“We just had a blood drive on Monday, last Monday, and we collected 47 units of blood,” Trotto said. “That’s more than I could do for him.”
“If there weren’t people donating blood, then, to be honest, I might not be here,” Tyler said.
Trotto said now that she’s organized blood drives, she also recognizes that there’s a need for volunteers at blood drives. So, even if you can’t donate, you can still help.