So I'm lying there in the bed and I'm seeing these bags drip down of blood and I'm thinking
who in the world did that, who donated this blood.
It was somebody.
Somebody who gave blood saved my life.
I would not be here had I not had it that quickly because it's right here in town.
My name's Jenny Dodson.
Rad Dodson.
Rad is short for Robert Ashley Dodson, that's my initials so that's why I'm a rad.
I was rad before rad was cool.
I'm from Pennsylvania actually but moved down here in 1980 to Montgomery, Alabama.
I was actually the recipient of a blood transfusion in the middle of going through chemotherapy
for stage three breast cancer.
Which I am now six months clear.
Went through about five and a half months of chemotherapy after we had only been married
three months.
Got the diagnoses May of last year.
Started chemotherapy April 20th and finished October 3rd of this past year.
And I did have reconstruction, it was stage three breast cancer in just my left breast
but it did travel into my lymph nodes which I was actually glad about because that's how
I found it.
There was a little lump under my arm pit that was about the size of an English pea and about
six weeks later it was the size of a walnut.
Had it checked and they said we want to do another mammogram and then we want to do an
ultra sound because still something looks funny.
And the biopsy came back positive for both and I call at work and that was a real shocker.
Chemotherapy kills everything else too, so several times I didn't have any white blood
cells.
So I would go to work wearing a particle mask and I would draw a smiley face on it with
a red Sharpie.
I was in retail too.
The first round of chemo was eight weeks long and it was called Adriamycin, which is the
red devil which is the kicker.
That's the one where your hair falls out, every bit of body hair is gone and everything
in you is dying including the cancer.
And now it has come back.
I like my little white spots.
I think they're kind of cool and it's curly.
Aren't those white spots blond?
They're blond, right.
One time I had no red blood cells and that means red blood cells basically take oxygen
to your muscles and your brain and I could barely walk from here to sit where Rad is
sitting without feeling exhausted.
They got me in for some blood tests and said you need a blood transfusion, now.
Thankfully, LifeSouth is two minutes from where I was in the cancer center next door.
This is where the blood came from and if they had waited two to three days, I would not
be here.
You see the bag.
It's physically, there's a bag filled with somebody's blood and it is going into you
and it is saving your life.
Honestly, it was, it was very humbling.
When I was sitting there just watching the blood drip and I'm thinking, whoever this
person is whether he is old or young, where he's from, or she is 18 or 20 or 50.
I really wish that those bags had names on them because if I could've just made a phone
call and said do you realize how much this had helped me and that it saved my life.
And that what donating blood does.
My name is Ashey Bock, I'm Jenny's sister.
I work at Baptist Medical Center South.
A lot of patients that need the platelets and the blood are cancer patients because
the drugs they give them, you know your blood counts will tank.
They will and they'll go up and people will feel better.
Especially with the red blood cells it's almost hours they'll feel a lot better.
When you give the, when you're administering the blood to the patients, how quickly do
they feel better?
Because I felt better pretty quickly.
A lot of them feel better almost immediately, you know within hours or the next morning
you walk in and their color is a lot better.
I was very thankful to have my sister with me being a nurse, it definitely helped me
during the journey.
We went through the journey together.
She was there with me when I found out I had pneumonia.
She sat through treatments with me before I lost my hair.
She's been such a sport, you don't realize that.
I've never seen anyone go through chemo like my sister.
When her hair started coming out she had a party, a shave your head party.
It was on my birthday last year, June 2nd.
In the middle of chemo I lost my job.
What you get when you are taking chemo is called chemo brain and you're fuzzy all the time.
You can't remember names.
You can't remember words like I was shopping with my mom and I was pointing at a skirt
but I could not come up with the word.
We started praying about what I should do and we kinda decided I would use my artistic
talent to start my own business out of my house.
So now I hand paint wine glasses and coffee mugs and beer steins and crafts and anything
glass basically.
I've done lake scenes and I've done beach scenes.
It's therapeutic for me to sit in my little kitchen nook and with my paints and the sun coming
in and I can make people so happy when they see them.
Now she volunteers two days a week at the cancer center helping other woman.
I do. I'm paying it forward.
I'm trying to get her to be the first paid volunteer but nobody over there listen's to me.
They don't listen to me either, I need a raise.
No, I love going there because they get to see my hair grew back, my eye lashes.
They went in and did the mastectomy and found no cancer whatsoever.
Except they found that little spot on the lymph node.
One dot the doctor took a pen and said here's how much cancer is we found and she took her
pen and made a dot on her piece of paper.
I'm six months in remission I guess is what it's called.
Because you're really not clear of cancer until the five year mark and once you hit
that it's like, yes!
If you're afraid of needles and everything I went through and you're not giving because
you don't want to see blood or you don't want to have a needle poke.
It takes 15 minutes and it really saves lives.
Everybody needs blood at some point, I mean if you've been in a car accident or if you're
like me and gone through chemo and it's destroyed your red blood cell count or you need platelets
or you need white blood cells.
Please just donate blood.
It's so important and you are actually saving somebody's life.
You may not know who they are but at some point that blood is going to be used to help
save someone's life.
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