United Kingdom: Woman Shares Her Tainted Blood Story
April 10, 2015; Posted by: WeBleed staff
Gill Fyffe speaks on her bad blood transfusion and her realization with Hepatitis C.
In 1988, the National Health Service was using blood for transfusions that was obtained from prisoners – however they were not screening it thoroughly. By that time, the United States and France had already stopped using blood from these sources and started using there own practices.
Gill Fyffe lost four pints of blood giving birth to her daughter Lucy that same year and she was hopeful she would not need a blood transfusion. It was the height of the AIDS panic and as a teacher, Gill was meant to put on plastic gloves if one of her pupils cut their finger and needed a plaster.
“I found it unsettling,” she tells The Daily Record. “I had to take these precautions then they said they were going to whack four pints of blood into me. Wait a minute. What happened to the plastic gloves?”
Eventually she had the transfusion, went home and attempted to get on with her life but something wasn’t right.
“I used to come home and fall asleep,” she said. “The kids would wake me up when it was time to go to bed. Then one day in 1995, my husband woke me up because there was a letter – telling me I had hepatitis C.”
Since that time, Fyffe has written a book, Lifeblood, about what happened as a result of those four pints of blood. It touches briefly on the Penrose Inquiry, the Scottish Government probe which found 3000 people were infected with Hep C and HIV from contaminated blood.
To continue reading Gill’s story, please click here.
Photo Credit – The Daily Record
