ANN ARBOR, Mich. – It’s officially Michigan-Ohio State week and on Sunday, hundreds of people came out for a different kind of “blood feud” that can help people in need.
Today was the 43rd annual “Blood Battle” between Michigan and OSU, with the Michigan side being held at the Stadium Club at Michigan Stadium.
It’s part of the bigger “We Give Blood” competition between all of the Big Ten schools that’s been going on since October.
“It’s always tight, it’s always contentious,” Megan Abramzom-Levitsky, senior project manager for Wolverines for Life. “For the last three years, Ohio State has been winning the blood battle. However, we are ahead of them in the “We Give Blood” competition.”
While it’s all in the spirit of competition, the need to donate blood is very real, particularly with a national shortage of available blood.
The blood drive also focused on helping people sign up to be organ, tissue, and bone marrow donors.
“I really do see the impact that those blood donations make in our patients every day,” Levitzsky said. “And it really is amazing how much of a difference that donation makes on our population.”
One of those people is U of M senior Skylar Grossberg. She was at the event helping to register people to donate bone marrow. Grossberg, who is from Philadelphia, had a bone marrow transplant in 2021.
“I had pretty severe aplastic anemia, and then the start of [Myelodysplastic Syndrome], so I was starting to develop cancer,” Grossberg said. “They didn’t want to wait for the cancer to fully develop.”
Grossberg was first put on the bone marrow donor list when she was 14 and a match was found two years later.
As she was prepared to get her transplant, however, her donor got COVID-19, putting everything in peril.
Enter her fellow Philadelphian, Lev Calman, who got on the registry years earlier after a family friend was diagnosed with cancer. He had forgotten he was on the registry until he was contacted and told he was a match.
“They had to do a very quick move for somebody to step in and take his place,” Calman, who was at the event with his wife, said. “It was a whirlwind experience for me.”
The transplant worked, saving Skylar’s life and changing Lev’s at the same time. Calman got emotional thinking about how he was able to impact her life.
“It’s the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done, and to be a small part of, like all the great things that she has done and will do, it’s the greatest privilege”
Skylar had a message for anyone who might be on the fence about donating.
“Your decision of being on the fence about being a donor is what affects whether they are going to live or not the next day.”