Joyce Gottesfeld remembers the moment on Feb. 10, 2012, when a code blue rippled through Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver — a patient had gone into cardiac arrest.
Gottesfeld had just met with expectant mother , who was ready to deliver her daughter, before the emergency struck and mobilized dozens of staff members.
“We forget, but it can be dangerous for mothers to have babies,” said Gottesfeld, who worked as an OB/GYN at the time. “It looked kind of grim for a while. I had never even heard of someone getting chest compressions for an hour.”
During labor, Smith suffered a , a rare but serious condition that caused her heart and lungs to stop working and her blood to stop clotting — as well as her fetus’ heart to stop.
Six surgeries and gallons of blood transfusions later, Smith and her daughter were alive, but only after soaking up “every unit of (blood) platelets in the city,” Gottesfeld said from the stage at a event Thursday morning.
The average person’s body contains about 10 pints of blood. Smith required nearly 30 times that over the course of 48 hours — or 270 units of whole blood and blood products collected from more than 300 people.
Flanked by her curly-haired daughter Anne-Claire (now 4½) and husband, Adam, Smith got a chance to meet, thank and tearfully hug 29 of the donors who saved her life at the Bonfils Blood Center’s Community Lifelines event.
More than 200 people, including donors and St. Joseph staff members who helped save Smith’s life, gathered in the Seawell Ballroom at the Denver Performing Arts Complex for an emotional tribute to voluntary donation.
“Issues like Cassidy’s really underscore that need for blood to be ready to go in advance of an emergency,” said Liz Lambert, communications specialist for Bonfils Blood Center. “We’ve got a 43-gallon lifetime donor here today, but one of the people here also only made four donations. She helped save Cassidy’s life, too.”
That 43-gallon donor, Paul Chamberlin, has donated 349 times. He was the first to step on stage to meet Smith and her family, following remarks from Bonfils and Saint Joseph officials who praised the selfless consistency of donors.
Denver-based Bonfils Blood Center collected about 142,000 blood donations last year and daily serves 100 hospitals across Colorado. The center operates seven community donor centers and up to 10 blood drives daily across Colorado. An eighth donor center will open in the fall of 2016 on South Wadsworth Boulevard near West Belleview Avenue, according to Bonfils.
Because of privacy laws, Thursday’s event was only possible because Smith came forward and voluntarily released her medical records, which allowed Bonfils to contact the donors and ask for their permission to be identified.
“For a while I thought: ‘Will it change me in a way? Will I feel different?’ ” Smith said of her new blood. “Like, my hair felt thicker for a second. But it’s sunk in that it’s such an amazing gift and a miracle that not only am I alive, but I still get to be myself. I get to be a mother to my daughter. I’ve never met any of these people before today, but I think about them all the time.”
