Cyr’s ordeal teaches a valuable lesson in giving

Robin Cyr began the morning of Nov. 15, 2015, as she did most mornings – sitting in a meeting. By the end of the day, she was in an emergency room, clinging to life. Cyr, associate vice chancellor for research compliance, remembers feeling sick enough during that meeting to think she might have the flu. She soldiered on.

But by late afternoon, she began feeling hot. Not long after that, she felt like she was going to pass out. That’s when a coworker decided to call an ambulance.

The last thing Cyr remembers was the short conversation between two emergency medical technicians who came to get her. One said, “I can’t get a pulse.” Then the other said, “I can’t either.”

In the emergency department at UNC Hospitals, doctors discovered Cyr had a gastrointestinal bleed and had lost a significant amount of blood.

“I had been bleeding out since the night before and didn’t know,” Cyr said. “Each time my heart beat, I lost blood.”

But finding the cause proved to be the easy part, Cyr said. The hard part – thanks to a blood transfusion in 2010 for hernia surgery that caused her blood to produce antibodies – was finding a matching blood type for a transfusion.

The wait nearly cost Cyr her life.

For nearly six hours, Cyr was kept in front of the nurses’ station so they could monitor her condition. She learned later that they were worried she might suffer a heart attack because her blood pressure had dropped so low from the large amount of blood she lost.

Throughout the night, Cyr did the only thing she could do. “I prayed,” she said.

Finally, after more than 12 hours waiting in the emergency room, she received the transfusion that saved her life. After the transfusion she was stable enough to undergo an endoscopy and that is when doctors located the bleeding ulcer on a major blood vessel and did the procedure to stop the bleeding.

It was not until Cyr received a second blood transfusion at the hospital the next day that she began to feel better.

“I can’t tell you how it felt when each drop of blood went into me,” Cyr said. “That feeling of life going back into my veins.”

Cyr learned a life-saving lesson from her ordeal she is eager to share with others: “I always assumed that blood was available whenever someone needed it,” she said. “But that is not the case.”

Every day, the Red Cross needs about 800 donations in the Carolinas Blood Services Region to meet the demand of approximately 100 hospitals. In the past year, the Red Cross for the region collected more than 279,000 red blood cell donations and more than 50,000 platelet donations from more than 226,000 donors.

For nearly three decades, hundreds of faculty, staff and students have been a major part of that effort – an effort that continued June 7 during the 28th annual Carolina Blood Drive at the Smith Center.

It would take Cyr more than four months before she was no longer anemic from the blood loss. But the same day she received the life-saving blood transfusions, she reached out via social media to everyone she knew who participated in the Carolina Blood Drive to tell them she was “eternally grateful” to every one of them.

“I told each of them, ‘Because of your generosity I am alive,’” Cyr said. “Without the blood transfusions, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”