Town pays off debt in blood

Think of it as paying off a blood debt - a 112-pint "thank you."

Last month, the city of Conrad - population 2,700 - donated blood to more than replenish what Kalispell Regional Medical Center's blood bank used in four July operations on one of its residents.

"We just did that as a 'thank you' for this blood bank," said Ruby Bouma, 70, wife of the patient who needed 42 pints of Kalispell Regional's blood. "It was a way to let everyone know we appreciate this."

Her farmer-rancher husband, Glen Bouma, 69, had not realized it, but he was born with a defective aortic valve.

As he got older, his work gradually wore down his shoulders until bone ground on bone and he had trouble raising his left arm over his shoulder.

The left-shoulder surgery was scheduled at Kalispell Regional in June.

But during pre-operative checks, a heart murmur was detected with the defective aortic valve as the culprit. That postponed the shoulder surgery and led to a July 2 operation to replace the malfunctioning aortic valve.

That operation, however, turned up another physiological glitch - possibly caused by the blood-thinning properties of Glen Bouma's medications.

His blood would not clot - leading to blood leaking around his heart.

A four- to five-day stay for one operation became a two-week stay involving four operations at Kalispell Regional - including three over a three-day period.

The hospital had to extract clotting agents from 42 pints of blood to bolster the weak clotting abilities of Bouma's blood.

Glen and Ruby Bouma had been longtime donors to Conrad's blood drives, with Ruby usually helping with the administrative end.

This led to a short story in Conrad's weekly Independent-Observer for a special blood drive on Aug. 14.

Usually, a Conrad blood drive nets 80 to 100 donors, Ruby Bouma said. However, 131 people signed in as donors for this drive, which produced 112 pints.

"It was during harvest, and everyone was out in the fields, and still people came," Glen Bouma said. "It's a miracle."

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com