As usual, things were going helter skelter for volunteers of Sankalp when they heard of another patient in need of the ‘golden unit’ - a bombay blood group unit. With already 3 requests for the same running in parallel, finding another unit was as good as searching for a needle in a haystack as big as one can imagine.
The patient was at St Johns hospital, Bangalore. After Sankalp had arranged for one unit for him, there was a need for another in less than 10 days time!. Now there was hardly a way things could have gone right. There was no eligible donor in the near vicinity and a tricky question began to haunt volunteers - Will a Life be lost for the want of a unit of blood?
But then, did not somebody say that heroes are made during adversaries? Surely, the statement looked true when Kumar, a Junior Engineer at Tata Motors, Jamshedpur came down all the way to Bangalore to donate his priceless unit of blood, the moment he found out the urgency of the need.
In 1996, he found out that he had Bombay positive blood group. Since, then he has donated more than 15 times. He had come to Bangalore the first time around 2005/06 when a child from Vilaspur, required the rare blood group. Amitabh expressed that it is very difficult for people to get Bombay group. He himself, having donated more than 15 times, knew that Blood Donation was safe, but was concerned at the fact that people had very conservative views about donating blood. Most people he knew that had this group are scared to donate blood and they wanted to preserve blood for themselves. Amitabh was aware of the fact of how vain this idea is.
We have known and seen people come up with excuses for sparing the precious 30 minutes for a blood donation. Incidents like these put such excuses to shame. Certainly his spirit to save a life deserves no less than a standing ovation. He helped us gift a smile, he helped us to give life another chance.