The Carter Bloodcare hosts blood drives all over Texas, but where does your blood donation go if you give in Waco?
Any donations collected in the Waco-area are sent to Carter Bloodcare in Bedford, more than an hour away from Waco, between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Donations are dropped off every day and there's a small window of time for them to go through production.
They're put in different bins, registered and processed based off their collection time.
"It's first collected, first processed," said Cheikh Sy, production supervisor for Carter Bloodcare in Bedford. "We have eight hours to process them, after eight hours, those units, they're no good anymore."
On Wednesday, there were more than 800 units to get through. Sy said sometimes there are as many as 1,500 units.
The pints are put through a centrifuge where they're spun at a high speed for 10 minutes to separate blood cells from plasma.
The plasma goes back in for 10 more minutes to separate platelets.
"When I'm processing a unit, I'm processing like it was for me," Sy said. "You never know who's going to receive that product. Is it you? Is it a family member?"
Once they go through the entire production process, they're sent off for testing.
If everything comes back clear, the unit is labeled and stored.
Willa Thomas, an assistant shift supervisor at Carter Bloodcare in Bedford, said units don't sit on the shelves for long.
"We do have hourly orders," Thomas said. "If I had to round it out, we send about 1,000 units a day."
Those units are sent to more than 200 hospitals across Texas.
A demand that's only possible to meet with help from the community.
Central Texas News Now will host a blood drive on Jan. 31 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Donors will receive a Dallas Mavericks shirt and a BOGO ticket voucher.
For more information on Carter Bloodcare, click here.
Copyright 2019 KXXV. All rights reserved.
