4th Time's the Charm?

Hi! My name is Emily Dong; I was last year's Donor Retention Chair for the Student Red Cross Club, and I'm acting as the Sponsorship Officer this year. I donated blood for the first time in high school, and I've been trying to donate as regularly as I can since then. I went to China this past summer and hiked the Great Wall, which was an awesome experience, but unfortunately defers me from donating blood for a year because of the risk of malaria in that region of China. I had a feeling that I'd be deferred for travel reasons when I got back, so I wanted to donate blood again before I left. My blood iron level tends to be just short of the cutoff, so I get deferred a lot, but I didn't expect it to take me the entire summer to be able to finally donate. It took me four tries and three iron deferrals (and eating lots of beef) before I finally succeeded. So to those of you with insanely high blood iron levels (can I borrow some please?), keep on donating! And to those of you with omg-seriously-I'm-only-off-by-0.2 g/dL?!?! blood iron levels, keep on trying!