100 Pints for Harlow: Blood Drive in Honor of Stevens Alumni Aiming High

By Tyler Maheu
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
CLAREMONT — On Monday, August 22, 2022, the American Red Cross is partnering with some Claremont natives to hold a blood drive in honor of Jaidyn Harlow.

Harlow, a recent Stevens High School graduate, has been battling leukemia since 2019. Now on her third round of the cancer, according to family friend and one of the event’s organizers Michael Huse, she is undergoing an experimental T-Cell therapy. According to Healthline.com, “Chimeric antigen receptor T-Cell therapy, or as Car-T therapy, is a treatment that helps your T-cells fight certain types of cancer.” In order to create cancer fighting T-Cells, there are five steps involved; collection of the cells, cells are taken to a lab where the genes are changed to fight the patient’s specific cancer, these cells are then infused back into your bloodstream, patients may get a low-level chemotherapy, and finally, the new Car-T cells attack the cancer within your body.

Huse states that this is a relatively new type of cancer therapy, which has been in the works for five to 10 years, and he says Harlow is the youngest out of 26 patients undergoing this therapy at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. According to Today.com, Emily Whitehead, the first pediatric patient to receive this treatment when she was five years old, is now 10 years cancer free.

Huse, whose son graduated from Stevens with Harlow, has helped with both of the previous two blood drives in honor of her. “We held the first one in 2019 down at the Masonic Lodge in Claremont and we received 38 pints of blood,” said Huse. “Then in 2020, we didn’t do it. But in 2021, the family asked if I would do it again and I said yes.” He states that last year’s edition, held at the Claremont Senior Center, of the blood drive collected 86 pints of blood, and that they had to turn people away at the door.

For this year’s event, the aim is even higher. “Our goal this year is 100 pints,” Huse stated. For this year’s drive, information for the community is said to be a key feature, aside from giving blood. Coming to Claremont will be members from the kidney transplant team, as well as BeTheMatch out of Rhode Island. Of the transplant team, Huse stated, “We all know somebody who needs kidneys. I figured let’s add something to this to provide more information to the community.” The organizations will be present at the drive, with booths both to provide information on how to give or donate organs, but also looking for possible live donors. “The primary goal is for the blood, and a second is educating the public for if they wanna be a donor,” Huse said. “It might not be important to you or I, but it is important to somebody.”

Sponsors for the event reportedly include Pathways and the Independent Order of Oddfellows, in addition to the help from the American Red Cross. According to Huse, some local Boy Scouts will also be on hand to help sterilize beds.

Making an appointment prior to the drive is recommended, but walk-ins will be welcome. In order to make an appointment you can call 1-800-RED CROSS or visit RedCrossBlood.org and enter the code CLAREMONTCOMMUNITY. For those with appointments, and those who are walking in, the Blood Drive will take place at the Claremont Senior Center’s Multipurpose Room at 5 Acer Heights Road in Claremont. The event will run from 12 to 6 PM.

Appointment bookings have been slower this year than expected, Huse stated, but he believes that people will show up. “Claremont has its good and bad, but I believe there are still enough good people to find a hundred pints of blood.”