I could tell the blood service was in trouble – I was asked to give so much, I got anaemia

As the NHS reveals that blood stocks are now at their lowest levels since the Covid pandemic, regular donor Mark Cook reveals how he felt pressured to give even more than usual, with complications for his own health

It comes as no surprise to me that stocks of donated blood for transfusions are at a critical low. I’m as keen to do my civic duty as the next person, but my recent experience of giving blood has put me off from doing it again.

Right now, the NHS donation service is even more desperate than usual for us to give up our red stuff. New figures show that the amount collected last December was the lowest monthly total since the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020.

This, despite an urgent appeal in the summer for O-type blood donors, after supplies dropped to an “unprecedentedly low” level. The health service revealed that the shortage was so bad that it only had enough of the universal blood type to last 48 hours.

Now, around 100,000 appointments are now needed to boost dwindling stocks, and the NHS has launched a new winter appeal, calling on Brits to “give the gift of blood” this Christmas.

It’s all very commendable – but I’d say be careful what you wish for.

When I last gave blood in September, at a drop-in in the Westfield shopping centre in west London, I got a nice email of thanks, and another one telling me where my “armful” had gone. On this occasion, it hadn’t made it far from the donation point, all the way to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

That simple text message always leaves me with a nice glow of a job well done. But then I got a call from the blood donation service asking, would I like to book to donate again in three months? That had never happened before – and, I thought, a bit pushy. I said I didn’t want to commit that far ahead. The caller suggested I could make an appointment and then cancel it. Not much point in that. I declined.

More recently, a routine blood test a month after my donation revealed that I was anaemic, with low iron levels. According to my doctor, the two things were likely linked. I am now on a course of iron supplements, which are having unpleasant side effects on my stomach. I am also constantly tired, and this winter I seem more prone than usual to catching colds and whatever else is going around.

Apparently, it takes four months for a person’s iron levels to get back to normal after giving blood – but three months is now the set time between donations. I have twice been rejected at the donation centre because my haemoglobin level was too low.

I can understand the increased pressure to get my donation. My blood group is B-negative (only 2 per cent of the population have this) and today the stock of that group is 3.4 days, the lowest of all groups and almost half the desired level of six days.

But, at 68, I am considering giving up donating altogether because of the anaemia and the effect it is having on my general health. Asked whether I should stop, a person from the blood service noticeably went to great lengths to avoid saying “Yes…” When I suggested I should wait a while and see how I feel in a couple of months, he said that my own health was important, but reminded me that I had given on nine occasions “and saved 27 lives”. No pressure, then.

I really want to keep giving blood as, for 25 years, I wasn’t able to. During the early days of the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s, gay men were given a “lifetime” ban, as a precaution. Despite all donated blood being screened, the ban was only lifted – and only partially – in 2011, when the service accepted gay volunteers on the proviso they hadn’t been sexually active for the previous 12 months.

Now, the NHS permits gay men to donate if they are celibate or monogamous: you have to tick a box on a long form stating that you have not had sex with another man in the past three months. Gay men on the HIV-prevention drug PrEP are barred from giving blood.

That’s a lot of people who can’t give blood. Caution is understandable: Labour’s recent Budget set aside £11.8bn for survivors of the blood infection scandals of the 1970s and 1980s.

I still haven’t decided what to do. I think those who can give blood really should think about it – it’s an easy and great thing to do. But if to help make up the shortfall I’m putting my own day-to-day health at risk, where’s the logic in that?

If I do stop, I’ll miss those nice texts.