What have you been binge watching during the pandemic? We all have our favorites and why we love them. Seattle’s Jill Gallagher has a reason why she’s binging and it’s literally saving lives. Producer John Yeager explains on this edition of Bloodworks 101. Listen to the episode here and don’t forget to MAKE AN APPOINTMENT TO DONATE! Episode transcript below:
Interviewer: All right, Jill, tell me who you are and what you do.
Jill: My name is Jill Gallagher, and I run the Seattle Restaurant Support group on Facebook.
Interviewer: Now, when I hear Seattle Restaurant Support group, I think that has to be in response to everything that happened to the restaurant industry after COVID.
Jill: That’s 100% what it was. As soon as the COVID pandemic hit, actually before it really got bad out here, restaurants were losing reservations overnight. And I noticed that… I can backtrack if I need to, right? If I’m tripping over my words? I recognized that it wasn’t just the restaurants who were being affected by that but everybody who worked in the restaurants, the chefs, the line cooks, the bartenders, the servers, the bussers, the dishwashers, the janitors, and then the people who were supplying the food, the farmers, the cheesemongers, the fishmongers, the florists. All of these people who were gonna be really strongly affected by restaurant closures if a lot of restaurants started to close. So I jumped in and figured out a way to support the restaurants.
Interviewer: And they did close, and they are sometimes or many times, they’re still closed.
Jill: Yeah. A lot of them did close either temporarily, and then they were able to switch to a takeout model. But some of them, unfortunately, did close for good, and it’s a true shame.
Interviewer: All right. And you’re sitting here near an apheresis machine about to donate platelets. Tell me about that.
Jill: A couple of friends of mine were donating platelets fairly regularly and I would see it on Facebook, and I questioned my doctor, I said, “Is this something I can do?” Because I didn’t really know what it was. And he said, “Yes.” And then I just kind of decided to do it about a month or two ago, maybe. And it’s something that I now do every week to every other week.
Interviewer: How do you feel when you do it?
Jill: It’s funny. You get, kind of, this buzzing feeling when you’re doing it. Do you mean physically how I feel? Yeah, I get a funny buzzy feeling while you’re doing it. It’s apparently the anticoagulant attaches to calcium when it puts the blood back into your bloodstream. A doctor friend of mine told me about that. So it’s, kind of, a weird feeling, but I’m used to it by now. And I know that it’s nothing bad, it’s just one of the side effects. But I don’t get lightheaded. It’s not like giving blood because you get the blood pumped right back into you.
Interviewer: And you obviously know that there’s a huge platelet shortage right now, and so you couldn’t have decided to do this at a better time.
Jill: I didn’t know that there was a huge platelet shortage until I got to Bloodworks, and then I found out that there really was because people give blood more than I think they think about giving platelets. So it’s a longer time commitment and it’s a different process. But yeah, now I know that the hospitals are in a dire need for platelets. And they also have a shorter shelf life, so it’s even more important to give them.
Interviewer: So Save A Life… Got a frog in my throat. So, Save A Life, what does that mean to you?
Jill: Two things, for me, that are really important, are both lifesaving and enjoyable, and one of them is food and restaurants. And the Save A Life coalition came together with a bunch of chefs and restaurateurs and said we need to come to the rescue of this crisis right now just like the restaurants always seem to do. They always seem to wanna jump forth and help out when they can. And this was just a really cool way for them to lend their voices to a community that they can reach very easily.
Interviewer: Okay. I’ll wait until she gets started.
Woman: Okay, fine. I was just checking everything. But you can stop.
Interviewer: Okay. I’ll wait until you start.
Jill: Did that answer make sense? Did I answer it?
Interviewer: Yes.
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