Blood infusions are a necessary part of life for former employee

Every 20 days, more regular than clockwork because her life depends on it, Gail Wilder slips through the doors of PeaceHealth Medical Group’s Center for Oncology and Infusion Services in Bellingham.

She’s been doing it for eight years. For two and a half hours every three weeks, Wilder, 59, watches and waits as life-giving gamma globulins enter her bloodstream, giving her immune system a temporary but oh-so-important boost. It could be the difference between life and death for Wilder, who has been told that her next bout with pneumonia will probably be her last.

Wilder, a Western Washington University employee from 1985 to 1991, has a primary immune deficiency disease, and it’s her regular intravenous immune globulin therapy that keeps her up and running. Wilder’s case is one of 150-plus primary immune deficiency diseases recognized by the World Health Organization, all of which keep a person’s immune system from properly fighting off disease. As a result, she’d often be sick, and her minor sicknesses would, almost without fail, progress to major ones.

She has plowed through bouts of pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and emphysema.

“I’m kind of a tough cookie,” she says.

And she shows it, too. She loves volunteering at the campus blood drives, handing out flyers or copies of poems she’s written and talking with passers-by about donating blood. She has fond memories of her time at Western, and she always gets a kick out of being back on campus.

“I love this place, and I loved my students,” she says.

Back when she was a WWU employee – in Old Main Room 265, she remembers – she became concerned that too many students were graduating without a firm knowledge of how to pay back their federal Perkins loans. Some, she says, didn’t know they had to pay them back at all. So, Wilder instituted and led an information session for graduating seniors that gave them all the info they needed.

It was all about helping them succeed, she says.

And that’s what volunteering at the blood drives is, she says: helping others succeed. She’s helping others understand why donating blood is so very important, she says, and she’s helping those, like herself, who rely so heavily on that blood.

Before her PIDD diagnosis and subsequent immune globulin therapy, Wilder came down with pneumonia a number of times. It was just too hard for her body to fight against it, to keep an invasion of the common cold from becoming an attack of something much more ominous. But in the past eight years, she’s had pneumonia just once.

“I still get sick, but it doesn’t turn into pneumonia,” she says.

That’s a huge step for Wilder, who once wrote that she was on a first-name basis with the emergency medical technicians who so frequently visited her house, and that every time her husband called 911 because she couldn’t breathe, she thought her goose was cooked.

“The treatment works,” she says. “The problem is that it takes blood.”

The quarterly blood drive at WWU continues through April 22 on campus. The Puget Sound Blood Center is conducting the drive from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Viking Union Room 565 and at the Mini Mobile on Red Square near the Humanities Building.